Serena Bassano

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.

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.