Maria is having great difficulty getting on with her parents because of their blind, consumerist approach to life. Traumatized by continuous family dramas, having experienced the disappointments of firs love, Maria decides to go up the mountain to a holiday home. There she meets a conceited architect, a shy teacher, a finical jurist, and a timid journalist (all of them representatives of the intelligentsia) who are domineered by the manager of the holiday home and his 'problems'. Maria's resignation changes into a rebellion against impersonal submission and sheep-like compliance with those who hold power. Thus Maria endures a long period of introspections and builds up the strength of her character. She finds moral support in her memory about her aunt Irina who once took part in the antifascist struggle as a partisan and later died as a doctor in the Vietnam War. Her life becomes the supreme example of how one should live for the sensitive Maria.