On the verge of the crisis in his creative output and obsessed by his model, Saskia, a young German girl with whom he has a complex relationship involving love, dependence and sadism, painter Hugo Sierra paints only one more painting a “Liseuse” which is at once innocent and perverse. An old man, a shadowry mover and shaker in international drug trafficking, buys the “Lisuese” that the painter has just finished. The gallery owner, who doesn´t see Hugo Sierra as being well-known enough to be profitable affair if the painter painted more, decides to shake the artist up the price of his works by staging a phony theft of the picture. When the painting is stolen, the old man realizes that it represents something essential for him, but the obsessive reconstruction of the erotic scene depicted in it, only brings him disappointments. As if sexual failure weren´t enough, he discovered that Saskia, to whom the gallery owner has introduced him, is a drug addict. In introducing the old man to Saskia, the gallery owner has been trying to get the model away from the painter, because of her negative effect on his art. Acting on an anonymous tip, the police get the painting back and proceed to get lost in a sea of conjecture about the meaning of the purchase and the mysterious disappearence of the artwork. They wind up concluding that the “Liseuse” has a secret meaning. Their sudden interest in the painting sets off a series of events...