Visually this works very well for the movie, but it doesn’t seem very realistic to me.
Anyway, if we take it for what it is, a strange movie fairy tale, it’s not bad after all. The ending is somehow too open for my taste, though.
The story: the film starts with ‘once upon a time’ but we’ll learn that the reason is that the male lead writes modern fairy tales.
It’s the story of Roberto Mariano (Edoardo Leo) and Beatrice Benassi (Ambra Angiolini). They meet outside their psychiatrist office. He went there because he’s a kleptomaniac, she went because she’s narcoleptic. They share the urge to cross the street by walking only on the white stripes, and when he sees her doing that he’s like stroke by lightening and thinks she’s the right one for him. He tries many times to talk to her but she’s not interested, and finds his insistence and his gifts rather annoying.
One day though they meet again and are both stuck when they see that the white stripes are gone because are being remade (although they look perfectly alright the time before and now have apparently been cancelled before being remade..), also the workmen are on lunch break so she doesn’t know what to do until Roberto takes the equipment and draws a big vertical white line where she can walk. After this kind of ‘romantic gesture’ they start talking and liking each other. He’s single but she’s in a relationship and has been for many years. One day she’s forced to change her usual schedule of activities and gets home earlier to find her Amedeo (Ennio Fantastichini) with another woman. She storms out and starts walking and crying until she faints on a sidewalk. She stops going to her therapist because she’s being cured in an institution. She meets Roberto again by chance and he tries to make her remember about him. She always carry around a big book where she writes all her life, including pictures of people. The first time she wrote that he was annoying and to be avoided at all costs, and beneath that she wrote that she loved lemon-and-coffee ice-cream. Somehow the post-it with “change of mind” written on it has been misplaced and appears to be over the ice-cream thing, so he shows up again with an ice-cream cone, saying that if she hates it he’ll never bother her again, but she loves it, therefore there was no change-of-mind on that. They start talking again, and get to know each other and fall in love. They move in together, have a son and live happily a few years, until one day she meets Amedeo again. It must have been a strong emotion, maybe she remembered him all of a sudden, and she fainted. Roberto and the child are very worried, not hearing from her again. They know nothing for weeks, until his friend Francesco who works at the passport office finds her. She remembers nothing of his life with Roberto or of her past with Amedeo, she only thinks that Amedeo never gave up on her and kept looking for her until he found her, and is now living with him and working in his business firm selling clocks. He frantically searches his house for her big book with their whole life together, and finally his son admits it is now under his bed - for years she never went anywhere without it, but that day she went out without it happy that she felt strong enough to leave it at home, so she had nothing to remind her of what had happened before. It was a result of their successful life together, just like she had no more narcoleptic episodes and he had stopped stealing as long as she was with him.
Roberto immediately drives up to Switzerland but only when he gets there he takes a look inside the book to discover that his son had stripped it of all its contents, taken away all the pictures, leaving only one. The last page was a picture of the three of them together, and the child covered it with a drawing showing himself and his dad alone. I felt for this scene, because they didn’t give the child’s feeling much space, and Roberto hadn’t known what to tell him because he hadn’t known what had happened. He now has only one picture, but when he’s finally face to face with her and she appears to be fine and without the slightest memory of him, he doesn’t show it to her, instead giving her an elaborate excuse for his presence and then walking away.
Even if she doesn’t remember him something makes her look outside the window. She looks at him and sees how he crosses the street and in the spur of the moment she runs after him to talk. The movie ends with the two of them going for a coffee... it seems clear that they’ll get back together, but we don’t know how he’ll break to her the big news that she has a son.
A couple of things to add about this movie:
1-Roberto writes modern fairy tales, meaning not the usual ones about princesses but modern ones about the real world with grandmas dying an kamikaze-kids. His editor obviously hates them, but his teenage son got hold of them and read them and loved them, and gave them to his school mates to read, so now the editor wants to publish them. He writes two books of stories if I’m not mistaken.
2-His friend Francesco (Paolo Calabresi) was in a relationship with Valeria (Susy Laude). He kept saying how he was tired, how he wanted to avoid being alone with her. He didn’t want to have time to talk to her and didn’t share her enthusiasm at the idea of having children, but never said so to her. Francesco kept inviting Roberto so that they wouldn’t be alone, and wanted him to keep living in their house for the same reason. When Roberto told them that he was planning of finding a new home to move in with Beatrice, Francesco reacts badly, saying that they can both live with them in the spare room because after all it’s empty and they have no use for it... Valeria gets upset because she thought they had already planned to turn it into the baby’s room, and she leaves him. From that moment Francesco becomes obsessed with her, he wants her back, keeps calling Roberto, saying that he loves her. Years go by, Valeria has another relationship but that too ends and Francesco keeps hoping. There’s no definite closure for them either, but she looks at him tenderly when he reads Roberto’s child a bedtime story while babysitting, because Roberto has left to go find Beatrice.
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