it's not particularly funny and it's not particularly sad. if somebody wanted to make a movie for aliens about an average year in a life of an ordinary 27 year old art student, that would be it. i kept thinking: now, something interesting will happen, but it never did. such a monochrome black and white movie.

the very deliberate sappiness completely ruined any real emotions for me.
just one of the million stories about "tragic" kids falling in love, not even an original take on one.

The film is set in Italy in 1984, 1991, 2001 and 2009 and jumps back and forth in time.
Mattia and Alice (children in 1984, teenagers in 1991) are both traumatized, and considered weird by the people around them.

The film begins with a loving family - George Farber (Tim Roth), his wife Ann (Naomi Watts), his son Georgie (Devon Gearhart) and their dog, arriving at their lake house. Their next-door neighbor, Fred (Boyd Gaines) is seen with two young men, Peter (Brady Corbet) and Paul (Michael Pitt), who seem to be their friends or relatives. The two young men come over to borrow eggs. Ann is in the kitchen cooking while George and Georgie are outside by the lake, tending to their boat. They seem friendly, and they use George’s golf club. When the men depart with the eggs they soon return with them broken. After asking for more eggs which also end up broken, Ann becomes frustrated, but when George tries to force the men to leave, Peter breaks George's leg with the golf club and they take the family hostage. Ann goes to call for help on the family's cell phone, but finds it unusable, having been earlier dropped in the sink by Peter. Paul then guides Ann on a hunt to find the family's dog, which he had killed with George's golf club. When the family's other neighbors arrive for a visit, Ann passes the two men off as friends until the visitors leave.