An adaptation of Maupassant's “Pierre et Jean,” A Woman Without Love (also titled “When Our Children Judge Us”) follows the melodramatic tale of a young woman who betrays her ailing husband but refuses to leave him, and allows him to think that her second son, the product of her affair, is his own. The two sons grow up to be rivals, and an inheritance from a mysterious “friend” forces a confession from their mother. Critics have had a hard time defending A Woman Without Love, however, at a 1974 retrospective of Buñuel's films at the Biennale of Venice, it was noted, “Nothing could be further from the truth than the opinion of certain critics that this film belongs among the old Bette Davis melodramas of the forties.... Within the framework of the drama something surpasses these conventions.... At the end of the film, when it appears that (Rosario) has finally been tamed and will return to her bourgeois cage, in a scene with double meaning very much like that of Belle de Jour (1966), she calmly sits down at the fireside and like Penelope begins knitting the ridiculous web of her pointless rebellion.”