The Spectator

Where I've never been to live, Francesca's emotional conflicts, 50, is the only daughter of a famous Turin architect, to whom she visits only on rare occasions. For many years, Francesca lives in Paris with her teenage daughter and her husband Benoît, a financier on her sixty, apparently reserved but paternal and protective about her. Due to a domestic accident that forces the elderly father to bed, the woman flees to Turin to take her parents in the design of a villa on a lake for a young couple. At work he meets architect Massimo, his peer-minded career and engaged in an open relationship with independent Sandra. After a tough first approach, Massimo and Francesca create a strong professional tune that leads to a deep and passionate feeling. For the first time in life, both will have to really confront themselves and their most authentic destinies ...

Forty year-old Bruno Ledeux, seen sitting across from the doctor, gives the impression of a man who is no longer young but not yet old.Condemned to remain nothing more than a son, he begins his downward slide, as if a fog had shut him in a cage from which there is no escape. Bruno can never have children .He says nothing about this diagnosis to Anne, his beloved wife. Nor does he tell her about a large debt he has taken out. It is as if Bruno were a man without any qualities or talents. A mediocre man who has lost all pride. Though now everything appears hazy in his memory. Like a river that flows peacefully, showing no signs of the hidden currents at work below. But at times those currents can return to the surface. Without warning.

Dino and Anna are a couple in their forties. Their relationship is hardly conventional: in fact, it is unconsummated. Dino gets out of it, gratifying himself with prostitutes and swingers. He reaches his nadir when he looks up Anna’s old boyfriends to ask about their sexual relations with her, and even begs them to take her back, as a way to end their relationship. Anna can’t find a way out herself; she can’t bring herself to end this one-of-a-kind, tormented love affair. In the end, Dino’s angst is what makes her feel loved, feel unique. No solution seems to be waiting in the wings.

Fists of Dollars & Spinach is a 1978 film directed by Emimmo Salvi. It is the first flesh-and-blood film about the adventures of Popeye, anticipating the Disney film Popeye (1980) by Robert Altman by two years