A rainy day. When a car fails to stop at a red light, a fifteen-year old girl is thrown off her motorbike. The ambulance races towards a hospital - the same hospital where the girls father works as a surgeon. Timoteo (Castellitto) waits as his colleagues perform surgery on his only daughter. Trembling and distressed beyond containment, he calls his wife, Elsa (Gerini) to return from a trip to England. He stares out the window. The sight of a strange woman, just sitting alone in the pouring rain,
triggers a series of flashbacks. The longest and most haunting of these is a scorching summer of many years earlier in a squalid, semi-abandoned urban wasteland where he met a destitute young woman, Italia (Cruz), with whom he had a powerful and visceral love affair... |