Luisa De Santis
Acqua e anice is a “dance hall road movie” about Olimpia, a legendary ballroom dancer and a fixture at local dance halls, who, at age seventy, dusts off her orchestra’s tour bus. No tour dates, this time: she is simply setting out to see her fans, her loved ones and all the places where she became a star, once again. For the occasion, Olimpia has hired a young woman, Maria, as shy and awkward as Olimpia isn’t, to be her driver.
The stories of five women very different from each other, yet linked by morbid and violent love experiences, are intertwined in a drama inspired by the collection of short stories by Dacia Maraini published in 2012 by the same title of the film, "Love Stolen ".
Mirko and Genziano are two brothers trentacinquenni not seen since the day their mother, of English origin, died tragically in a car accident in which they were also involved. Since then Genziano went to live in London by his grandfather Henry and now works as a stockbroker. Mirko instead remained in Rome, to live with his father, working on it together in the same run-down shop. But, eighteen years later, Marcello dies, the father of two brothers. In his will, in fact, the father asks them to take on an old restored spider, his ashes over the grave of his mother in a village in Calabria, where the accident happened. This trip will forever change their lives.
An American girl on vacation in Italy finds an unanswered "letter to Juliet" -- one of thousands of missives left at the fictional lover's Verona courtyard, which are typically answered by a the "secretaries of Juliet" -- and she goes on a quest to find the lovers referenced in the letter.
Nicola is a man who has spent much of his life in a mental institution, though not always as a patient. Nicola's mother suffered from mental illness, and when young Nicola grew old enough to understand some of her stranger behavior as well as the family's other dark secrets, a few of the adults around him preferred to suggest he was disturbed like his mother, and he was encouraged to visit an asylum not far from his home. As an adult, Nicola has spent enough time around people who have a tenuous connection with reality that he has a superficial resemblance to them, and has developed a strange set of imaginary friends to go along with his eccentric real-life companions and the woman he loves from afar, Marinella.
A Senegalese boy arrives in Italy in search of fortune, with the desire to work in the fashion world. But life throws in some tragicomic situations.
A brief tribute to the grat director, spanning through some insights about his character, his works, his life, through the words of critics, relatives, colleagues, with a collage technique of interviews, archive footage, and brief excerpts and pictures from some of his works.
Geremia, an aging tailor/money lender, is a repulsive, mean, stingy man who lives alone in his shabby house with his scornful, bedridden mother. He has a morbid, obsessive relationship with money and he uses it to insinuate himself into other people's affairs, pretending to be the "family friend". One day he is asked by a man to lend him money for the wedding of Rosalba, his daughter. Geremia falls in love at first sight with the bewitching creature and and soon indulges in a "beauty and the beast" relationship...
Saverio, a dentist, comes out as naive as usual while he falls in love with Alia, a russian immigrant he met in Rome. He must now deal with issues a guy like him would never have thought to come across.
While walking in a garden of statues of women, Ester and her friend Adele see two women kissing. Ester then dreams of kissing Adele and later imagines making love to her while she is in the arms of Oscar, her husband. She confesses her passion to Adele and also tells Oscar that she loves another. His jealousy takes over: he assumes it's a man, and he begs Adele to help him discover this rival's identity. Eventually Ester tells him she loves a woman. This makes him even less reasonable: he jumps between bewilderment ("Am I a cuckold?") and violent anger. After he gets drunk and figures out that Adele is the object of Ester's unconsummated desire, he becomes dangerous.
Onetime campus radical Nanni Moretti renounces his past to become a priest. Returning to his home village, Moretti is appalled at the lack of religious reverence amongst the townsfolk. Unable to communicate with any of his old friends, who've all gleefully succumbed to the Deadly Sins, Moretti cannot even count on solace from his own family, a screwed-up aggregation which gives the word "dysfunctional" several new meanings.
Suave Fulvio (Marcello Mastroianni) woos women as he and the Sublime Brothers, 20 of them, attempt revolution in 1816 Italy.
As Italy becomes engulfed in a bubbling revolution to finally get rid of the ruling Austrian's,a patriotic prisoner called Cainazzo begins to wonder if he will soon get the chance to see the revolution in action away from his prison cell.Suddenly,a cannon ball comes flying through the air and knocks the main wall of the prison down. Excited in at last having the chance to see the change taking place in person,Cainazzo hits a bumpy road,when one of his former fellow prisoner yells out to all the revolutionary gangs that Cainazzo is not a patriot,but is in fact a traitor!
Young Alvise's body is paralyzed, or at least he thinks so. He is infatuated by his beautiful aunt Lea. What starts as innocent therapy and care soon develops into strange erotic and psychological battle between them.
