Anchor plot: Larry (Stanley Tucci), an expat piano player, settled in a remote island village seven years ago. Now he runs a small boutique hotel with his girlfriend, Miranda (Jessica Hynes). Every evening he plays the piano at a local restaurant to inattentive customers; all this has left him highly unsatisfied, and he has always wanted to do something big in life. So one day he decides to host a gala concert dedicated to a native son and noted composer, Valentin Lucinsky, whose widow Veronica (Marisa Paredes) still resides in a grand villa in the village.
At first Larry manages to convince Veronica to allow the concert to be held at the local amphitheatre, where famous pianist Narcisco Ortega (Virgile Bramly) would play her late great spouse's music, 'chosen by her'. Things soon start to go awry, as his long lost daughter Frankie (Jena Malone) arrives out of the blue, looking for him, another social-climber, Sebastian Burrows (Hugh Bonneville), latches on to the project convincing Veronica to give it to him and Larry's girlfriend grows suspicious of his relationship with the composer's former muse, Helena (Emmanuelle Seigner), who leads a secluded life on the island. As the movie progresses, several sub plots reveal a variety of estrangements between various key characters, and gradually they are healed amidst the rising melodrama surrounding the concert.

Plot A: Paul Exben is a remarkable success story: a partner in one of Paris's most prestigious law firms, boasting a substantial salary, a spacious home, a glamorous wife, and two sons who could easily grace the pages of a high-end fashion catalog. However, his world shatters when he uncovers his wife Sarah's affair with Greg Kremer, a local photographer. In a moment of passionate fury, Paul commits a fatal mistake. As he stands over the lifeless body of his wife's lover, Paul comprehends that his once-perfect life is irreversibly shattered.
But rather than succumb to his grim circumstances, Paul decides to seize a radical opportunity. Assuming the identity of the deceased man, he escapes to a remote region in former Yugoslavia, nestled along the enchanting Adriatic coast. In this secluded refuge, Paul is granted a second chance at being true to himself and, finally, gaining a profound perspective on the grand tapestry of life.

Plot B: Ostensibly set in the near future, the film tells the life story of an elderly man named Thomas Van Hasebroeck (who has dubbed himself Toto, after a childhood fantasy), looking back on his ordinary, apparently uneventful life in a complex mosaic of flashbacks, interspersed with fantasies about how events might have turned out differently. It is not always possible to tell the difference between embellished or manufactured memories and fantasies, as Thomas is a very unreliable narrator, but some scenes (such as the narrative thread that features Toto as a secret agent) are definitely fantasized.
Thomas firmly believes his life to have been "stolen" from him by Alfred Kant, born at the same time as Thomas, who Thomas believes was inadvertently switched with himself as a baby (characteristically, the film remains ambiguous as to whether this substitution ever actually happened, with Thomas' only substantiation being his apparent vivid memory of the day he was born). Thomas' jealousy of Alfred has overshadowed all his life, often with tragic consequences for his loved ones, and he is plotting revenge. Throughout most of the film, his intended revenge takes the shape of a plot to kill Alfred, but in the end Thomas finds a more creative and surprising way to "take back" his life.