Marina is a young woman attempting to be a good mother to her two-year-old son. She decides to spend the summer in the mountains, in the hope that the change will improve her child's sleeping habits. She rents an apartment from Manfred, a man who is distrustful of women. The two generally avoid each other until an unfortunate event of the boy having a fall forces them together. Fifteen years later, Marina returns to the mountain to find Manfred to rekindle the desire she had felt, but upon which she had not acted.
reported that the drama film produced unintended laughter from its audience at the Venice Film Festival when some of the verbal interaction between the characters of Marina and Manfred were misinterpreted by viewers. In defending her film after its screening, writer/director Comencini stated, "Alcuni momenti della storia sono emozionanti, e non sempre ai festival l'emozione è accettata. Ci vuole coraggio, ad avere emozione". She offered that while it might be acceptable to insult a film when it was over, doing so during a screening is a form of violence that negatively affects the perceptions of other viewers. Último Segundo offered that the it was surprising that a 55-year-old filmmaker could write such a childish screenplay. Variety panned the film for its lack of proper character development by writing of the two leads "The script doesn't bother to give her a career or background, other family or friends. She's not in her 20s, but it seems she's never known anyone to have a baby before. If Marina is a cipher, Manfred is given too much of a backstory, allowing Comencini to indulge in the most facile pop psychology profiling." They also make note of Comencini treating the situations "as wisdom from the skies" when the commonplace events surrounding a child sometimes injuring himself were, for most viewers, "hardly a revelation". The also noted problems in its "laughable dialogue" being too overly ernest. Mymovies.it wrote that the novel was betrayed by the film in that Comencini failed to create a proper screenplay from her book, itself judged to be "pieno di una tensione che non si placa mai, come in certi amori che fanno male". Offering a positive view toward the film's screening at the London Film Festival, the British Film Institute wrote that Claudia Pandolfi was convincing, the Alpine location was a "starkly beautiful but wild and dangerous backdrop that is a notable feature of the film's atmosphere and impact", and that the film was "a tour de force adult melodrama that recalls both David Lean's Passionate Friends and Ulu Grosbard's Falling In Love but is distinct from both."
