Infelici e contenti

Aldo, a former bank employee and a celebrated water polo player, carries the quiet ache of a life overturned by a terrible car accident that leaves him in a wheelchair for good. When his wife Alessandra heads off for the August holidays, she sends their dog Peppino to the kennels and quietly books a room in a nursing home run by nuns for him, a place that promises care but also casts a spotlight on the vulnerability that illness imposes. In this unfamiliar setting, he crosses paths with Vittorio, a blind man who traffics counterfeit goods, a figure who is both a guide and a risk in Aldo’s new reality. Vittorio shares a room with a Spanish nurse, Suor Teresa, a woman he often harasses, and together they hatch plans for a journey to Sanremo to push counterfeit Rolex watches into circulation.

The voyage is a tangled bouquet of small adventures and sharper tensions. On the road, the two men encounter two young girls from the nursing home, Ornella and Sara, who reveal themselves to be thieves in disguise beneath innocent exteriors. A sideways romance blooms when Vittorio flirts with Valeria, Aldo’s sister, during a family visit, adding a layer of complexity to loyalties and trust. A perilous escape from men to whom Vittorio owes money threads through the days, reminding them that every move is shadowed by danger and debt.

A pivotal encounter unfolds one evening at a casino, where Aldo and Vittorio cross paths with Petrelli, an engineer who becomes the instrument of fate: he turns out to be the man who struck Aldo with his car three years earlier. Petrelli offers a lifeline in the form of casino chips totaling a million, and as Aldo accumulates winnings, a promise forms—one that Petrelli allegedly made about a future favor: a villa where Aldo might finally escape the cramped walls of his wheelchair-bound life.

When the two men finally reach Petrelli’s villa, the host’s cool reception raises alarms in Vittorio, who senses that something is amiss. Yet he agrees to stay the night, hoping for a hidden mercy. The night reveals a deeper betrayal: Alessandra is there too, and she has decided to leave Aldo and pursue a relationship with Petrelli, tired of the compromises demanded by disability. Rather than tell Aldo the truth, Vittorio makes a decisive, dangerous move—he slips onto Petrelli’s yacht and strikes him with his stick, severing the delicate thread between old loyalties and new temptations.

Back home, Alessandra returns to fetch Aldo, and the television news later confirms what Vittorio’s bold assault has wrought: Petrelli is now confined to a wheelchair as a consequence of the attack. The revelation reshapes the orbit of every character: Alessandra resumes life with her husband, and Vittorio disappears into the shadows, content that his friend will have his wife by his side once more. In this winding tale of friendship, desire, vengeance, and the stubborn resilience of those who navigate life from a wheelchair, the film threads a cautious, morally ambiguous line between care and manipulation, between companionship and betrayal, leaving a lingering sense of how far one man will go to reclaim a sense of normalcy in a world that keeps reminding him of what he has lost.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 11:13