When Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch meet for the first time in Paris in the summer of 1958, they are already international celebrities of the literary world. In the four years that follow, they dabble in great love and an open relationship between his hometown of Zurich and her adopted Rome.
While inspector Alexander Haller relies on his investigative instincts, his partner Nikolai Falk has to overcome irrational fears. Screenwriter Nils-Morten Osburg uses the admiration for the Habsburg monarch, who, out of vanity, did not allow herself to be photographed for decades, as the background for a sophisticated story about a photograph that should never have been taken.