A casa nostra (2006)

In cold, gray Milan, the banker Ugo arranges an illegal operation with the help of a unscrupulous politician. Rita, a captain in the Guardia di Finanza, investigates Ugo’s dirty dealings. Rita has a young boyfriend, Matteo, who shies away from responsibility. Elodie, an aspiring model and Ugo’s lover, cheats on him with Gerry, a supermarket clerk. Ugo goes to a conference with Elodie; there, he first has sex with her and then leaves her. Having had Gerry followed, Ugo forces him to act as a front man in illicit operations, threatening to expose his affair with Elodie. Faced with the money he sees changing hands, Gerry is captivated and deludes himself that he can change his life, despite his wife warning him against easy money. Meanwhile, Bianca, a pregnant Romanian prostitute, falls in love with Otello, one of her clients, a gas-station attendant who is required to report to the authorities after killing a woman fifteen years earlier. When Bianca is found in an irreversible coma by the side of a road, Otello has no alibi, and Rita arrests him. Ugo’s powerful wife cannot have children and suffers so much that she secretly buys baby clothes. Through Gerry, Ugo obtains from Bianca’s Romanian pimp the right to claim Bianca’s child as his own; Bianca is being kept alive on a ventilator. While it emerges that the prostitute’s killer is a seventeen-year-old who killed her during a robbery that went wrong, Bianca gives birth to a baby girl before her life support is switched off. In the room next to hers is the mother of Rita’s boyfriend, in intensive care after a heart attack. Cleared of suspicion, Otello proposes to Bianca’s sister that she move in with him, along with her son Nicolas and the newborn. At Rita’s suggestion, the hospital forces Ugo to undergo a genetic test, which will show that he cannot be the child’s biological father. As they leave Niguarda Hospital, everything is resolved collectively. Ugo gets back into his car, dejected. Gerry, who has come to pick up his wife, a nurse who cared for Bianca to the end, is arrested by a squad from the Guardia di Finanza. Rita’s boyfriend’s mother is discharged, accompanied by her son and husband. Elodie gets psychiatric medication from a compliant nurse. A Milan of somber cinematography, fragmented lives, parallel loneliness that will never intersect; money as a means to buy objects, feelings, lives, favors, and power. But in the provisional finale, Otello and Rita—love and justice—achieve a partial redemption.