A black comedy that would make Buñuel blush, Conjugal Warfare intercuts three stories of what the director calls "romantic psychopathology." It is set among the "suits" in the mythical coffee-capital of Curitiba, a pastel-and-poison milieu peculiar to the kitsch-bourgeoisie. In one vignette, a lawyer obsessively indulges his erotic fantasies about his clients (he is drawn to girls in flats and women in mourning) until an encounter with an old school chum sets him straight. In another, a sensitive young man finds satisfaction in progressively older women, his passions bordering more on the vampiric than the Freudian. And in the third, an aged married couple's conjugal rituals give a new twist to the bonds of domesticity. Its eye for dementia (in young and old) makes Conjugal Warfare a bitter and blistering satire on bourgeois values and tastes, but for de Andrade, it all adds up to "the possibility of redemption through excessive sin."