Gioia is a high school teacher who has never known any other love than the oppressive bond with her own parents, with whom she still lives. One of the students at her school, Alessio, is cashing in on his own body to make a couple of hundred euros to help his mother, a cashier in a supermarket. The relationship that dawns between Gioia and Alessio is forbidden fruit, fragile yet, inexplicably, one they can’t do without. Still, Alessio’s desire to improve his social standing is a silent killer that prevents him from ultimately accepting Gioia’s surprising affection for him. He goes and destroys it all, cancelling the only person who has ever loved him.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
When Alessio bursts on the scene and into Gioia’s quiet existence – the only life she knows is from reading books, and Flaubert is her guide to love – a collision is inevitable and irreversible. Gioia and Alessio are two fictional characters reinvented for the screen who embody the sense of alienation that characterizes the present day. All around them, desperate, petty figures hardened by their ruthlessly provincial lives. The feeling we get is of an abandon, a cupio dissolvi, a toxic yearning for self-destruction that poisons their existences. Gioia’s own sacrifice – her feelings too pure for her to conform to a cynical world – marks the final failure of redemption from evil for he who has committed evil.