A woman married to a cruel, petty railroad worker lures men into her life with the intention of getting one of them to kill her husband-her only way out of the poverty of life in a grimy little backwater. The weapon of choice will be a small ax purchased at the market. In plot, Double Indemnity meets The Postman Always Rings Twice. But in its blanched cinematography and relentless exteriority, Porto das Caixas offers one of Cinema Nôvo's clearest expressions of theme: as Glauber Rocha wrote in his seminal essay, "An Aesthetic of Hunger": "Cinema Nôvo shows that the normal behavior of the starving is violence; and the violence of the starving is not primitive....Is the woman in Porto das Caixas primitive? From Cinema Nôvo it should be learned that an aesthetic of violence, before being primitive, is revolutionary. It is the initial moment when the colonizer becomes aware of the colonized."