La vita che vorrei (2004)

stefano is an established actor. the control, a certain coldness of feelings and ways, seem to characterize him deeply. it seems that so far only work has really absorbed it. right now a film in costume must begin, a love story set in the nineteenth century. the female protagonist should be played by chiara, a good actress, linked to stefano by a relationship of deep friendship. instead, the day of the audition with the director, in place of chiara, stefano finds a stranger: laura, a thirty-year-old girl, intense, spontaneous, untidy, who so far has done almost nothing in the cinema and with a past that makes her really hard to believe in itself. to increase the mistrust and attraction of stefano at the same time, it is laura's immediacy, that way of mixing everything, of confusing reality and fiction, life and representation. however, what stefano and laura are unable to say to each other in life can sometimes be said on the level of representation, that is, precisely in the costume film they are shooting, through the love story between federico and eleonora.