Da zero a dieci (2002)

Baygon, Libero, Biccio, and Giove are four friends approaching forty who live in Correggio and lead quiet lives. In the summer of 2000, they decide to spend a weekend in Rimini, exactly twenty years after the weekend that was abruptly cut short by the death of the youngest member of their group, Mirco, who was just sixteen, in the Bologna train station bombing. Everything, from the hotel room to the women who will join them on their adventures, is arranged by Libero in memory of that experience, in the hope of recapturing feelings that have long since faded. During the vacation, Libero takes care of organizing their “birthdays”—days devoted to fulfilling each of the four men’s wishes and aspirations. Thus Giove, an aspiring musician obsessed with asking everyone to rate their lives from 0 to 10, finds himself singing the only song he has ever written on a stage set up especially for the occasion; Baygon, a jokester but a lousy ladies’ man, gets to spend the night with four prostitutes; Biccio, a gay doctor, gets to parade through the city in a carriage dressed as a drag queen; and Mirco gets a memorial in the TV room of the guesthouse where the four friends are staying. Libero, whose life is shaped by dialysis, instead decides to take part in an illegal, high-speed race on the Misano circuit, where he loses his life. Libero will not return from the weekend at all, while the other three friends will emerge changed in some way, each having a moment of growth in his own way: Biccio has a fight with his live-in partner, who throws him out; in his room, Baygon covers the huge Jim Morrison poster he had been talking to until then; and throughout the film, whenever anyone asked, Giove would reply that he and his wife had chosen not to have children. In the finale, we see his wife, and she is pregnant. The story takes place over four days, from Thursday to Sunday. The final day, August 2, 2000, marks the twentieth anniversary of Mirco’s death (although in reality that date was a Wednesday).