Synopsis

"Don't be cruel. Don't be sentimental. Try to really feel something." It may seem like love, but it's a story of violence waiting to explode, wedged in an endless plain that forever prevents us from climbing the hill. At the center is Teresa, who in her diary describes herself as "a provincial spinster, a young lady without qualities." She still lives with her parents, submerged in a gargantuan routine: Thursday osso buco, Tuesday tripe, fish only when it's fresh. Then Alessandro arrives, and the world suddenly ignites. Alessandro, who is beautiful, who wants everything and has nothing. Armed with a merciless, lyrical, humorous language, capable of surprising us with every line, Marta Cai strolls through the streets of an anonymous town and manages to make us feel like we're there, trapped among rows of houses, market stalls, and distant horizons. With the certainty that at any moment something terrible will happen. Teresa is forty-seven years old and lives in a provincial town "neither big nor small, neither known nor unknown." A lifelong daughter, dominated by a domineering, voracious, and talkative mother. Teresa is thin as a prune and smokes constantly. Alone, very alone, she stays afloat by following the slow rhythms of her days: errands downtown, English lessons at the high school where she works, bike rides. "I live like a sole, on the bottom," she confides like a young girl to her secret diary. Only there, between the lines of the only space of freedom she's allowed, can she fantasize about Alessandro, a handsome and overly kind former student of hers. Teresa dreams of him with a vividness that stuns her. But when he suddenly reappears before her after months of emptiness, he has completely different plans in mind. With her gaze and her voice, Marta Cai illuminates everything: she is capable of penetrating her protagonists' points of view and respecting the buzz in their heads, of perfectly calibrating the alternate editing and then making it explode, of loving Teresa and treating her with ferocity.