In Parma, in the year 1962, a young student named Fabrizio grapples with the pull of the Italian Communist Party while trying to reconcile it with his comfortable, middle‑class upbringing. He debates his engagement to Clelia, who shares his social background but isn’t drawn to ideological debates, and he confides in his best friend Agostino, whose own reckoning with faith, family, and politics creates a tense contrast between Catholic roots and Marxist rhetoric. Fabrizio urges Agostino to seek out Cesare, a schoolteacher who helped shape Fabrizio’s political worldview, hoping his conversations might sharpen Agostino’s stance.
Into this already fragile balance arrives Fabrizio’s aunt Gina, his mother’s much younger sister from Milan, who moves into the family home. Soon after, Fabrizio is stunned by news of Agostino’s drowning in the Po River. He spends time interviewing local youths who were present the night of the tragedy and becomes convinced that Agostino’s death was a suicide. Through this investigation, Fabrizio piece by piece pieces together that his friend’s apparent hatred of his parents may actually be a hatred of himself, a theme that unsettles Fabrizio’s own sense of purpose and loyalty.
A complex affair unfolds when Fabrizio and Gina begin an intimate relationship. He introduces Gina to Cesare, and the three of them read and discuss philosophical works while reflecting on Italy’s fascist past. Gina tells herself she loves Fabrizio but keeps that feeling to herself, while her nights are haunted by insomnia and a constant sense of anxiety. She speaks to a nameless “doctor” in nightly phone conversations, and she worries that someone may be trying to push her away from Parma.
Their fragile dynamic is tested when Fabrizio encounters Gina leaving a hotel with another man. He leaves in anger, but later that night Gina consoles him, insisting that he is not yet a mature man with a wife and family, implying that their bond cannot be dismissed as simply a fleeting affair. The complexity deepens when Fabrizio, Gina, and Cesare meet with Puck, a longtime lover of Gina who has lived off his father’s land yet has never held a real job. Facing financial instability and an uncertain future, Puck laments the changing times, and Gina’s forceful rebuke of Fabrizio’s insult to Puck highlights the charged tensions between loyalty, pride, and the shifting social order.
As time passes, Gina returns to Milan, and Fabrizio attends a communist rally in Parma’s Parco Ducale, where his growing disillusionment with the party’s ideas begins to surface. Some days later, Fabrizio marries Clelia, choosing to maintain his connections to his original social milieu even as his heart and mind drift toward a more unsettled stance. The wedding day culminates in a striking, unsettling moment when Gina is seen kissing Fabrizio’s younger brother Antonio, signaling the persistence of old attachments and the unresolved currents running beneath the surface of political conviction.
Set against the backdrop of a nation wrestling with its past, the narrative threads together personal longing, existential doubt, and a critique of both ideological certainty and the compromises of everyday life. The film unfolds as a careful, human portrait of a generation caught between tradition and transformation, where love, loyalty, and ideology collide in ways that are intimate, painful, and revealing.
