Il giorno in più (2011)

Giacomo is successful at work: an excellent observer of human nature, he is good at talking and persuading clients to close deals. In matters of the heart, however, he is a compulsive womanizer who struggles to maintain a mature relationship for more than a few months, and so avoids making an emotional commitment to any woman. One day, on his way to work, he notices a girl on the tram. After watching her every morning and exchanging a series of glances, Giacomo falls madly in love with her, even though he doesn’t know her name. One evening, to rebuff the advances of a woman he has been flirting with for work-related reasons, he finds himself having to make up a girlfriend and uses the girl from the tram as his model, giving her the name Agnese. The lie grows ever more entrenched when Giacomo realizes that having a fake girlfriend protects him from overtime at work and his mother’s anxious lectures. But when he receives a wedding invitation addressed to him and Agnese, and cannot think of another way to keep the lie going, he decides to strike up a conversation with the girl from the tram. The next morning, however, the girl—whose name he will discover is Michela—gets there first, finally speaks to him, and invites him for coffee, which then turns into an invitation to dinner as well. At the end of the evening, Michela tells him that she is about to move permanently to New York, having landed a job at a publishing house, and that she had decided to speak to him that morning precisely to say goodbye. A few days later, Giacomo accepts a job in South America, but during a stopover in the Big Apple he changes his plans and decides to stay in New York to look for Michela. The girl, however, is cold when she sees him again, because she would have preferred to cut ties with her life in Italy for good. In the end, though, Giacomo proposes a sort of game: they will be a couple for a limited time, just for the few days remaining before their final goodbye, making the most of a few days off and the fact that Michela’s boss, Tom, is in Chicago for an important deal. Tom, however, returns early, and the two reluctantly decide to end the game a day ahead of schedule. Once again, Giacomo cannot bring himself to tell Michela that what he felt for her was no mere game. Giacomo returns home and finds a complicated situation at work, where there have been staff cuts, but he also finds a more humane and honest way of relating to the people he cares about. At a certain point, Giacomo decides to meet Michela again and goes to New York, where he manages to get into her apartment and leave her a message in a book, setting a date to meet. Michela does not read the letter, however, because she is moving, and as she packs, the book ends up among the things to be thrown away. After various twists and turns, though, someone finds the letter and manages to deliver it to Michela. She shows up at the meeting place, where Giacomo is waiting for her.