Also Directed by Salvatore Piscicelli
Ernesto is doomed to loneliness since the loss of his wife. He is a writer who lives alone without any children, and is an antisocial person. However, he is as satisfied with his life. Although he has not been working for a while, a film director asks him to prepare a scenario on the life of "Teresa of Ávila". Meanwhile, a young peasant girl, Luana starts working with him as a maid. Now the time has come for an affair which he has ignored for some years.
Rosa (Marina Suma) is a low-level worker who decides to quit a nowhere job and turn to prostitution instead, all the while living with a boyfriend who is dealing drugs for his financial support. Entering into the picture is a homosexual friend who wants a child of his own and is willing to donate a good apartment to the couple if Rosa will marry her boyfriend and bear a child. She does get pregnant, but by that time has had it with the constant presence of the homosexual, and is having second thoughts about her pregnancy.
The film begins on New Year’s Eve 2001 when Angelica attempts suicide by somewhat theatrically cutting her wrists in the bath. Over the weeks that follow we learn all about the complexities of her life and her three best friends, the quartet of the title.
Tony is a young Neapolitan musician. He has a lot of problems and a past with drugs, but also with women. He is engaged to Susy, but he betrays her with a university professor, who has an invalid husband, but also with other young aspiring singers, who try in every way to break into the world of music. Among these there is Elena, engaged in various difficulties to organize a concert with the best names of Neapolitan music.
This is an uneven presentation of the tragedies plaguing the lives of two women from the lower economic strata in Naples. Immacolata is married, is bisexual, and runs a butcher shop that is not bringing in much money. Concetta is a lesbian, doing manual labor and now serving time for taking a potshot at her lover’s husband. Immacolata has also been put in jail for guiding a young woman into prostitution. Immacolata and Concetta develop an intensely passionate relationship in prison and after being released, they defy Immacolata’s husband and society’s scorn by moving in together. But external threats are not as destructive, in the end, as internal contradictions.
