Niels is overjoyed when he hears about the black hole that will drastically reduce his prison sentence. He’s been chosen for his talents as a mechanic to take part in a special mission: escorting a band of eccentric scientists in a spaceship to a black hole that is fifty light years away from Earth. The deal seems more than correct to him as the mission will only take six weeks for them to see Earth again. There’s only one small annoying detail. Those six weeks in hyperspace represent some hundred years on Earth. And that is if everything will go as planned.

Harold Chasen is a young man of 19 years with an overflowing and morbid imagination, who takes advantage of his free time to attend funerals, and stage suicides to react to his mother, Mrs. Chasen, a strict, tyrannical woman and a a bit hysterical, who takes care of finding a wife for his son. But when Harold meets Maude, "80 year old princess", nonconformist and full of life, everything changes for the young man. The old woman teaches him to love life through more wacky experiences than each other, and Harold falls in love with it.

Clement, nine, curious about everything, wants to understand life. Camera in hand, he walks the streets of his small provincial town, following and studying "grown-ups".