Synopsis

In the troubled South of Italy in the 1950s, Luigino endures a childhood of hardship and anger, which makes him grow up too quickly. He's cut off from all family ties, as his young mother is locked up in a mental institution and his father's name has never even been learned. Luigino has a dream: to sing on the radio and perhaps on the nascent television. As he grows, fearlessly resisting every misfortune and candidly accepting the fragility of his own impulses, his voice becomes increasingly soft and supple, like that of the divas of Sanremo and the great showgirls of the revue. Some ask him to imitate them in circus arenas or on the stages of vaudeville. The audience applauds and mocks him, extols and humiliates him, without managing to dent his natural innocence. When the path to show business is brutally cut off, Luigi decides to leave for Rome, searching for his place in the world, only to find himself surrounded by a humanity suspended on the edge of an invisible precipice. Until one evening he meets Elide, a fifteen-year-old waitress living alone like him, who makes him savor for a moment the sweetness of love and, immediately after, the torment of abandonment, dragging his life down a brutal descent with an unpredictable outcome. Gianni Amelio's narrative debut is a poignant coming-of-age novel, tender and cruel, desperate and radiant, unlike any other. Supported by a spare writing style that cuts to the heart of things, it reveals, throughout its plot, an unshakeable belief in the power of diversity, in the lucid madness that helps every human being survive, even when it seems like a night without dawn is falling.