A cartoonist and painter who can not stand out and make a living, among other things, as a photographer of news magazines and a beautiful young woman who comes to Buenos Aires from inside the country to try to make it as a model and actress, living a love as passionate as fraught with disagreements.
In Buenos Aires, a few days before traveling to Spain with his beloved wife Liliana Rovira to visit their son Pedro, the leftist Literature professor Fernando Robles is compulsory retired in the University, and he concludes that it is impossible to live with his pension. The crisis in Argentina does not allow Fernando to get a new job, and his wife decides to sell her family's apartment and move to a small farm near Villa Dolores to reduce their expenses. Fernando comes up with the idea to grow lavender and sell the oil to the perfume industry.
Peter, a young German, enters a suburban Buenos Aires restaurant; seeking only directions, he instead accidentally ends up with a plate smashing into his head, thrown by the irritable Olinda, the 60 year-old Italian immigrant owner of the restaurant. The two develop a friendship once they discover that the reasons for their having moved to Argentina are strikingly similar.
Two con artists try to swindle a stamp collector by selling him a sheet of counterfeit rare stamps (the "nine queens").
Jorge is a writer for a left-leaning Buenos Aires magazine that's at odds with the country's military dictatorship. He meets lovely and intelligent actress Laura and begins an on-and-off romance that will continue for the next two decades. Fearful of commitment, Jorge initially moves on from her and his fortunes suffer, but the situation changes when he and Laura renew their acquaintance. Meanwhile, the country undergoes a political transformation.