Carlina is a young junior high school teacher, stressed by the clashing relationship with her students.
Luisa hopes to make it in show business. Angela is a university
student whose studies are lagging behind. They are three friends sharing a small apartment in Milano and who
are at odds with enstablishment values. One day Carlina receives a visit from her cousin, Maurizio, whom she
hasn’t seen for a long time. Indeed, Maurizio had fallen asleep twenty years earlier, at the age of six, and
has just woken up, and isn’t yet very fluent in verbal communication. Carlina invites him to stay for a few days.
Later that day Luisa asks Maurizio to join her in a shooting for a commercial and Maurizio accidentally invents the
catch phrase for the product advertised in the commercial: "Ho fatto Splash!", becoming very popular.
A few days later Carlina announces that she’s going to get married in church, hoping to receive many presents from
friends and relatives. Angela and Luisa feel lost and betrayed by Carlina, but Carlina is determined to get married.
To be coherent with their way of thinking, Luisa and Angela accept the invitation to the wedding luncheon but decide
not to attend the church ceremony.
It’s the day of the wedding, Maurizio shares in as a photographer, turning the ceremony and the luncheon into a nightmare.
At the end of the day Angela and Luisa are too drunk to be able to stand on their feet, so Maurizio must take them home.
Angela, in a brief moment of soberness, remembers that Luisa is expected to act that very same evening in Strehler’s version
of Shakespeare’s "The Tempest". Luisa is too drunk and Angela decides to stand in for her friend in order not to lose the
rent money, and heads to the theater but she forgets to take the costume with her. Maurizio must therefore go back
to fetch the costume and bring it to her, but in his attempt to reach Angela on the stage in the middle of the play,
the show turns into a burlesque act.
The film ends on a take of Maurizio, Luisa and Angela lazily lying on a fake grass carpet at a fair stand, as stand-ins
representing Sixties and Seventies utopias: a legalized transgression taking place inside the same system they were rejecting.
The mirror scene was obtained in quite an interesting way: the camera "traveled inside" a mirror and rotated 360 degrees. This scene was entirely shot in studio, and it required two identical sets, one being the mirror image of the other.
The movie has the longest uncut sequence in a Nichetti film: five minutes of film without a cut.
Here is the sketch of its construction:
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