Diego (Stefano Accorsi) is called in by Paris (Thomas Trabacchi), who runs the day center for people with mental health struggles. The two talk, and Diego tries to explain what sometimes sets him on edge. (He's just been fired from a restaurant where he worked as a chef — he tore the place apart after a coworker rearranged the flour in the pantry.) "If my phone is sitting on the right side of the table," he tells Paris, "why would you move it to the left?" In other words: "What harm could that phone do on the right?" A simple shift can matter. And for Diego, something that looks harmless to everyone else is a real problem. But as the conversation continues, there's a detail that careful viewers won't miss: Paris himself — whose phone Diego had moved as an example — gets annoyed at what happened and repositions his phone back where it belongs. This scene, one of the first in Marilyn Has Black Eyes, the new film by Simone Godano, contains the whole message: we are all mad. Or to put it differently, there is no real divide between those who call themselves normal and those who carry a label — usually slapped on by society — of not normal.
The day center, where Diego begins attending meetings, is also home to Clara (Miriam Leone), whose condition is that she is a compulsive liar. It's through Diego and Clara that a big idea takes shape: a kitchen workshop at the center, which becomes a restaurant — the Monroe — where people struggling with their own difficulties can work and, yes, welcome the outside world. That world frightens them because it's full of endless prejudice. What unfolds is proof that something seemingly impossible can become real. (The kind of work that Ombre e Luci regularly covers.) In Marilyn Has Black Eyes, then, a genuine taboo is torn open — bittersweet, never banal — through what appears on screen: what so many want to hide, what we "look at but don't see." There are the broken parts within us, those cast out by society, the inadequacies we can recognize in ourselves because what has just been called mental fragility touches all of us. It should move everyone.
It is, in short, the story of two lonely people — and more — who meet and, through the power of sharing, manage to save themselves. At one point Clara says to Diego, "I'm all wrong." He answers: "You're fine just as you are." To accept yourself. Not to hide. Not to fear facing the world, facing life.
One more thought: when I went to see it, I brought two fears. First, that the film would offer a simplistic picture of mental illness. Second, and not unlikely, that the audience would laugh without thinking — laugh at the tics, the habits, the neuroses of the characters. Neither happened: no one laughed, and the film — in a simple, never simplistic way — has the power to tell that broken humanity forcefully enough to pierce the screen and leave something with the viewer.