What a silly, meaningless description IMDb uses for this movie: "It is the story of a boy, who leads a normal life with his wife, but full of enthusiasm and passion". While it's in fact a pretty serious psychological drama about opportunism and deceit, and about "what goes around, comes around".
Toni (a breathtakingly attractive Giuseppe Maggio) is a young, slightly naive guy, who used to do some amateur painting. By a chain of events he becomes sexually involved with the beautiful daughter of a rich family, who in her blind affection decides to promote him as an upcoming star painter. Toni lets himself go with this flattering flow, deceives his wife as well as his new lover with a more and more tangled web of lies, and ultimately gets crushed by both sides and by his own ambition.
Director Corsicato uses some unusual cinematographic means: in many scenes the camera is deliberately out of focus, or we see the main characters talk and gesticulate but don't hear them, and the score consists in several pivotal scenes of (rather bombastic) classical music. A nice touch was the fact that the paintings of Toni are never shown, leaving us guessing what their quality really was. The acting of most of the cast is excellent, not only Maggio, but also beautiful Carolina Sala as Chiara, and Sandra Ceccarelli as her impressive, intimidating mother.
I had hoped for a more definitive closure, but director Corsicato leaves it to us to construct what would or could have happened next; the last appreciative words of the renowned art-critic at least give some clue. All in all an entertaining, well acted and cinematographically interesting film.
