Serena Bassano

Set between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Zeno Cosini, a wealthy Trieste merchant, neurotic and smoker, is marked by a conflictual relationship with his father and a chronic sense of inadequacy that drives him to seek help from psychoanalyst Dr. S.

Valerio Rossello is a judge, with a rigid and uncompromising mentality. He is married to Lucia, a woman who instead follows the model of a loving and protective mother. From their union only one child was born: Maurizio. Both parents raise him completely differently, highlighting their character differences. Until the day when Maurizio, now a teenager, together with a friend commits an attack for futile reasons against a gas station attendant. Having learned of the incident, Valerio and Lucia also in this case intend to face the situation in a diametrically opposite way. The conflicts within the family thus strongly resurface, in which, amidst rebounds of responsibility, the errors of both parents emerge in the upbringing of their child.