Caught in the act during an affair, Sergio (Edoardo Leo) suffers a sudden illness and falls into a coma. In the waiting room, three people who have every reason not to want to see him again come together: his partner Gabriella (Claudia Gerini), his ex-wife Alba (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), and his son Giulio (Biagio Venditti). When Sergio wakes up, he is like a child in an adult’s body: he has to relearn everything from scratch. Once a domineering and emotionally detached man, he turns into a clumsy, tragicomic hero who keeps insisting he has been reborn, that he is finally capable of loving. But it is precisely this second, unlikely childhood that ends up teaching him something he had always missed before: how to truly care for his complicated extended family.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
This story happened to my father in the past, but it changed my son's future. Yet past and future always coexist in the present, in a certain sense; we could say that the time of this story is a vertical time.”
I decided to open the film with these words because they express its fundamental stylistic and narrative premise. I chose to set the story within a fluid temporality that flows between past, present, and future.
I asked Giulio Pierucci’s musical score to draw upon the old tradition of Italian cinema by creating distinctive themes for each character. I asked the same of Paki Meduri’s production design: the recurring presence of the Roman aqueduct, a monument of past, present, and future; the setting of a pozzolana football pitch beside the aqueduct, a place that evokes a memory of the past while still existing today; the beach of Fiumicino, with the lighthouse in the background; and the Casa Alba building, the very same building featured in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma.
The same approach applies to Carola Fenocchio’s costumes, which oscillate between the 1960s and the present day.
The narrative and casting choice to portray the film’s three male figures—Sergio, the protagonist; his son; and Sergio’s father—at the same age follows the same principle. They are all fifty years old: Sergio’s father because he died at fifty; Sergio because he is fifty today; and the son, who is eighteen, yet speaks with the voice of a fifty-year-old man because he narrates the story from a future in which he has already processed the past.
This vertical time, which may be mistaken for anachronism, is in fact an objective correlative designed to convey a simple message: patriarchal oppression is a story that has endured for millennia, and it is also a story of male emotional castration—something this film seeks, in its own way, to challenge and transform.
The style of commedia all’italiana is not only the stylistic foundation of our cinematic and literary tradition; it is also the only way I know to communicate a subject as thorny as male identity to a broad audience.