Carla, a no-longer-young choreographer, is surprised by the news that her father is suddenly dying, just as she is intent on putting the last touches to a difficult interweaving of bodies in her last, violent choreography. She rushes home and watches, anguished, next to her mother overcome with sobs, as her father, already motionless, is tried in vain by a doctor to revive him. With her head on the dead man’s chest, Carla tenderly whispers, in a kind of lyrical transport, all that her father was to her, while her memory recalls, in a delirious flash, the significant moments of that intense relationship of adoration-identification with the parent who – unbeknownst to her – indelibly marked her personality and her life. At the height of her bewilderment and despair, Carla climbs into her car and indulges in a hallucinating aimless flight, which gradually turns into a kind of inner investigation into her sentimental past, relived by meeting the various men in her life. Carla’s sentimental journey thus turns into an instinctive search for the reasons behind her tumultuous emotional instability and that restless dissatisfaction that has always determined her to be the first to break every bond with a man, from the most reliable to the most banal. In her frantic and seemingly aimless wandering, Carla is persistently tailed – with a discretion not without some tinge of indulgent irony – by Gianni, her last man, who senses, through the convulsions of her distraught mind and the eccentricity of her behaviour, her desperate striving for normality. The outcome of the father figure’s possessive exclusiveness is thus outlined, albeit laboriously, who, perhaps in spite of himself and in good faith, has in fact plagiarised his daughter, making her a ‘shadowy woman’, as whimsical, restless and sharp as she is devoid of certainties.
Source
Genre drama
Cast
Anna Bonaiuto: Carla
Francesco Capitano: Gianni Morace
Luciano Bartoli: Carla’s father
Daniela Morelli: Vera Biason
Carla Cassola: Carla’s mother
Francesco Carnelutti: Tony
Roberto Posse: Pino Biason
Antonio Cantafora: Vincenzo
Soundtrack Luis Bacalov
