After the death of his parents and especially his mother’s, Antonakis, a descendant of a bourgeois Greek family who inherits a house in the ex bourgeois and now decadent Athenian area of Kypseli, is plunged in bereavement. It is precisely this sense of loss that will allow Ali -the handsome, Algerian housekeeper who enters his life in order to help out with the taxing task of renovating and “weeding out” useless objects- to step forcefully to the forestage as a deus ex machina of sorts.