CLOSE TO ME

SYNOPSIS

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When lockdown begins in Rome, Luca (Riccardo Scamarcio), a high-school philosophy teacher harbouring a few latent frustrations, finds himself living through it alone after his wife Sara (Maria Chiara Giannetta), a doctor, is called back to the hospital to help deal with the emergency.

As the world around him comes to a standstill, Luca’s attention turns to his new neighbour, Amanda (Mariela Garriga). When desire drives him to break the distance between them, Luca is swept up in an uncontrollable passion. But the affair soon becomes a dangerous whirlwind that upends his life, with unexpected consequences.

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DIRECTOR'S NOTES

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For some time, I had wanted to make a film about desire: it is a disruptive force in our lives, and yet it seems largely absent from Italian cinema, as though we had stopped questioning the dark knot of energies that inhabits us, men and women alike.

Close To Me is about a “man who watches”. Married to a woman wealthier than himself and recently past the age of forty, Luca is a teacher in crisis who, during lockdown, finds himself reduced to watching Amanda’s life—the life of his new neighbour. He decides to break the distance between them, with disastrous consequences.

I sought a tone suspended between noir, thriller and romantic comedy. I love the genre-blurring cinema of the 1980s, in which an ordinary man is swept away by something overwhelming. I found myself following a similar path when I decided to set this film, written with Giacomo Bendotti, during the 2020 lockdown.

The defining moment of our generation offered many people an opportunity for a merciless existential reckoning—a void of meaning that made it the perfect arena for this story. Luca tries to escape that void, but things soon slip unexpectedly beyond his control.