Dark Illness 1990

Giuseppe Marchi, raised under the iron hand of an authoritarian father who wore a marshal’s uniform in the carabinieri, grows up in a modest family, making huge sacrifices to keep his studies but carrying a constant weight of difficulties and inner anguish. Now fifty, he carries the regret of never having had the chance to be beside his father on his deathbed, a missed moment that gnaws at him as he navigates a life crowded with unfulfilled promises.

An unsuccessful screenwriter, he spends time with Sylvaine, a French widow, and is soon drawn to a much younger woman The Girl. He is seduced by her, and their relationship leads to marriage when she becomes pregnant, a union that does not quiet the turbulence inside him. He dreams of composing the novel of his life, yet his attempt to have a script about Judas—reimagined with a commercial edge—falls short of acceptance, leaving him hungry for a breakthrough that never fully arrives.

Giuseppe pours himself into work, but the pain he carries is constant, a thread of excruciating emotion that refuses to loosen its grip. One day he makes the decision to seek medical examination, and he ends up in a clinic where they treat him for a non-existent ulcer and an illusory appendicitis, an encounter that only deepens his fatigue. Exhausted, he even contemplates suicide, a stark indicator of how far his internal turmoil has taken him.

When [Sylvaine] leaves with the baby for two months in Siusi, Giuseppe remains in the Roman heat, pushed to endure a difficult period as he tries to write the first chapter of his autobiography. His condition is complicated further by a mobile kidney, which leads to a recommendation that keeps him isolated as he treads water in a summer that never seems to cool. He hopes that joining his wife in the Alps will bring relief, but his manias and phobias do not release their grip.

Meanwhile, his script is rejected again; the client, troubled with the tax authorities, moves on, leaving Giuseppe with the burden of debt and a stark choice: cultivate olive groves in Calabria to repay what is owed. The turning point arrives when he places his trust in a psychoanalyst, whose blunt insight points to the father figure and conditioning as the root of his existential suffering. With this new clarity, the doctor’s words seem to offer a path toward healing. Yet the personal upheaval continues; his wife reveals she has been cheating on him for years, compounding the sense of betrayal that has shadowed him for so long.

Choosing solitude, Giuseppe makes a grave decision: he retreats to a shack among the Calabrian olive trees, tending a small vegetable garden as the day fades. From his quiet perch, he gazes toward the Strait of Messina, where the lights of Sicily shimmer in the distance—the land where his father was born and where memory lingers, stubborn and unresolved. In that remote, windswept dwelling, he begins to reconcile the past with the present, finding a humble, stubborn peace amid the landscape that once defined his family’s fate.