A very strange advertisement appeared in the personals section of The Village Voice in 1985. It offered to trade lives for one whole month. That is, each of the parties involved would inhabit the other's life completely. This movie is based on the screenwriter's idea of what might have transpired had that trade taken place in the Netherlands. In this amusing drama, Liesbeth is a masterful mother and wife who tends to her two boys and teen-aged girl with great affection and competence, while deferring to her psychiatrist husband for all major decisions. She fears she may be missing something, and at the urging of her husband, she places a "life-swapping" ad. All goes well until her husband learns that she has made her decision about whose life to swap with without consulting him. At first, the psychiatrist and his children are distressed to be cared for by a zany single woman writer who wears bright makeup and clothes and doesn't coddle anybody, but eventually the ice breaks, and they develop some affection for one another.