Gabriele Rossetti, Fabrizio Gifuni, a young teacher, returns to Bari after the death of his father, Ernesto Rossetti, the stationmaster in the small Apulian village of San Vito dei Normanni, where Ernesto lived happily with his wife and their little son. The film unfolds as a flashback that peels back the layers of a family shaped by longing, ambition, and the pull of art, all framed by the warm, sunlit textures of southern Italy. The memory-driven structure invites viewers to witness how love and disappointment coalesce around a man whose creative fire eclipses the ordinary rhythms of family life.
Ernesto Rossetti, Sergio Rubini, is a figure whose daily work as a stationmaster sits beside a headlong pursuit of artistic dreams. He cherishes Paul Cézanne's painting, and his longing to stage an exhibition becomes a consuming project that pulls him away from the home front and toward a public homage that he hopes will prove something about his own worth. This tension—between a man’s devotion to art and the responsibilities of family life—drives the narrative and paints a portrait of a community that alternates between admiration and skepticism as Ernesto pursues his vision.
A key turn in the story arrives when the local art critic—vain, sharp-tongued, and convinced of his own authority—stirs the pot with a dismissive newspaper article that undermines Ernesto’s plans. The clash between critic and creator intensifies the strain within the Rossetti household, casting a cold light on the fragile balance between artistic prestige and the day-to-day realities of those who stand closest to the artist. The film uses this moment not just to critique a single outburst of frustration but to question how public praise, private hope, and collective opinion intersect in the life of a family.
As the memories deepen, Ernesto’s fixation edges toward something more precarious: he copies Cézanne’s work and stages a second painting as if it were a fresh creation, a deception meant to expose what he sees as the villagers’ and the critic’s gullibility. The act reveals a man who believes that truth itself can be manipulated to reveal a larger kind of insight, yet the personal cost is steep. On Gabriele’s birthday, Ernesto’s renewed passion ignites a crisis that shocks the son and reverberates through the household, leaving the young teacher to witness the consequences of his father’s volatile genius.
When Gabriele grows older, he uncovers the deeper truth behind his father’s schemes: Ernesto had replaced a second painting with the original Cézanne, executing a calculated ruse to demonstrate the deceit of those around him. This revelation reframes the entire narrative, turning a tale of ambition and disappointment into a meditation on truth, memory, and the ethics of art. The film thus invites viewers to weigh the costs and consequences of pursuing greatness, even when the aim is to reveal fraud, and to consider how an intimate family story can illuminate broader questions about trust, representation, and the price of artistic integrity in a small Italian town.
