Good News 1979

An anonymous employee at a television company leads a quiet, routine life, commuting to work each day and returning home to his wife Fedora in the evening. At the office, he is repeatedly confronted with images of violence and disasters, yet he remains emotionally aloof, and his marriage is marked by a stubborn inability to communicate. He makes advances toward his colleague Tignetti and Fedora’s friend Benedetta, but both reject him, leaving him isolated despite his efforts.

One day, his old schoolfriend Gualtiero Milano contacts him after fifteen years, confessing that he is being followed by enemies who seem determined to kill him. Although Gualtiero cannot identify his pursuers, fear pushes him to seek protection, and soon he agrees to be committed to a mental hospital. The man becomes entangled in a charged moment with Ada Milano, Gualtiero’s wife Ada Milano, a liaison that neither of them can consummate because of their respective psychological strains. Meanwhile, a startling revelation arrives: Fedora is pregnant.

When a TV news report later shows Gualtiero’s violent death, the man races to the hospital and breaks down in tears, grappling with the possibility that everything around him is part of a larger, unknowable conspiracy. The motive behind Gualtiero’s murder remains murky, and the scene hints that the clinic’s high-profile patients might have drawn dangerous attention. At Gualtiero’s funeral, Fedora confesses that the child she is carrying is her dead friend’s, sparking a tumultuous confrontation. Despite initial fury, he agrees to raise the child, choosing a path that binds him to this uncertain fate.

Back at work, he receives an envelope from Gualtiero bearing the words:

not to be opened

He opens it to discover a sea of cards repeating the same injunction, a quiet, unnerving symbol of the communication breakdown and the inexplicable forces arrayed around him. The story lingers on a man whose life, once so ordinary, is unsettled by violence, secrets, and a chain of messages that keep multiplying without answers.