The film examines girlhood as inherited performance-costumes worn before identity forms. Mona frames femininity as simultaneous nurture and constraint, exploring how intimacy between girls and garments becomes predetermined theatre. Clothing functions as ritual and control, dictating movement before self-knowledge arrives.

A group of retired soldiers return from the Civil War to Texas, where they are no longer tolerated by the women who have become independent because of their unsuitability. The failed partnership ends in murder by poison and flight. One exception is a young woman who leaves the phalanx of women out of love. The comedy, disguised as an idyll, refers in many ways to classic models in the genre of the western and the home movie.