Marta and Jorge have been a couple for seven years. All their friends think they are living a perfect romance. Too perfect, perhaps, for the despair of all: Bruno, who is much younger than Marta but madly in love with her; Lígia, who is Bruno's sister and Marta's best friend and would love to see her brother happy; Carlos, Jorge's friend, who maintains a superficial romance with Lígia while secretly in love with Marta; and for Jorge himself, who is afraid this idyllic romance will imprison him and, convinced that his love and his lover's desire to marry will take away his freedom, decides to show her the way into Carlos arms.

In an abandoned shopping center, Luis sees his best friend being assaulted. Incapable of facing it he runs away from the adolescent violence that haunts him while struggling against himself.

In the hot month of August, Alice and her siblings go to their grandmother’s summer house. As the days go by, the house becomes a hive of slow straying bodies, as Alice becomes more and more engrained in her grandmother’s colonial past.

Zé is forced to work from an early age as a fisherman, as so many others did before him, to support his sickly mother. When he leaves to the other side of the river to ask his sister for help, his resolve — even before settings that are indifferent to his misfortune — becomes clear in a poetic way, even if all that is left for him is to continue his journey.