Two half-siblings Jana and Miroslav are ineffectually trying to escape their mutual attraction and break free from their fatal relationship. Two time levels, presence and 1970s, inter-mesh in the film.
Martin is an innocent lad from small-town Mlada Boleslav who comes to big-city Prague, hoping to exchange his krona for deutschemarks so that he can visit Germany. A local spiv named Robert obliges Martin, but at an unfair exchange rate. When Martin finds out he was rooked, he plans revenge on Robert ... but then decides to join Robert's gang instead.
Johanka had a fling with a well digger she had not met before and who, she was most likely certain, would never be around again. Just before his departure, they have sex and she eventually becomes single mother of a baby girl. 18 years later her (now 18-year-old) daughter Paulina commutes by bus to work in the nearby city, which gives the village gossips the occasional opportunity to remind her of her unknown father. A resultant conflict with her mother makes Paulina take up residence in the city. Johanka, prodded by her also-single friend Jozefka who maintains that a woman without a man is nothing, begins to woo the new teacher Jarek only to discover later that he is married. Paulina, in the meantime, loses her virginity to the soldier Jirka who promptly makes himself scarce. Johanka fails to consider that she actually has a better life than some of her married neighbors, begins to see.
The director of films for kids called Bonzurka together with her loyal assistants Drahuska and Honza are looking for the actors for a new movie "The Knee". Children for this movie should not be afraid and shy and they must have talent for acting. Thus the scouting is quite difficult. The most difficult is to find an actress for a main character who lost her hair after a serious illness and now has to spent the whole holiday in the countryside with a bald head resembling a knee. Although the makeup artist does his best an artificial baldness does not solve anything. From the selected little girls only the self-assertive Rosemary has the guts to let her long hair to be cut and shave off her head.
