The painter Tino, in professional and political crisis, receives a telegram from his mother-in-law, Selma, announcing her return from Europe. After his wife's death, Tino continues living with Selma, with whom he had ambiguous relations, which he now wants to sever. Weak at this impossible love, he asks the maid Enedina to lock him in his room. There, he revives memories through letters, notes and photographs. Selma's son João is waiting for her at the airport and dreams of loving fulfillment in his own mother's arms.

During a flight, passengers confront their aspirations, frustrations, fears, wishes and fears, mixing up reality and fiction.

The vacationers staying at the Barreiro Hotel in Araxá accompany the coffin of magnate Medeiros de Alcântara to the plane. Then they return to the hotel... At the beginning of the hydrotherapy season, Eduardo and Lúcia Feitosa, a wealthy couple from São Paulo, banker Belmiro and his wife, three spinster friends, Fátima, Teresa, and Belinha, Gen. Solon de Fuentes, the deposed former president of a South American country, writer Fernando Cavalcanti, banker Medeiros de Alcântara, and his wife arrive. In the hotel's halls and park, conventional life prevails, but it is in their rooms that the characters reveal their sexual and political dispositions.