A story of a family's dilemma between different family member especially between 2 generations which erupted on “chu xi” (the day before the first day in Chinese lunar year).
Reiko, a female college student, was looking outside with her newly purchased telescope. She bought it impulsively, but since she had no intention of using it, she looked around the neighborhood.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
Sixty year old Max is having something of a middle-age crisis. His marriage seems to go nowhere as the passion, tenderness and happiness vanished when their daughter moved out.