I'll Be Going Now : The love between grandfather and granddaughter
The bar where Rosa (Valentina Holtkamp) and her grandfather Augusto Scribani (Vittorio Gassman), who had come up from Rome to the north to see his granddaughter, meet for the last time, was set up on the panoramic terrace in front of the dock of Palazzo Borromeo on Isola Bella (Stresa, Verbano-Cusio-Ossola). As the young girl left, Gassman got up, descended the steps behind the tables and walked, dancing, down the path leading to the dock, overlooking Isola dei Pescatori.
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Plot:
Having spent eighteen years in a psychiatric care home, the over-sixty-year-old former bank director Augusto Scribani leaves and returns home. He still owns the house, but his daughter-in-law Carla lives there with nine-year-old Rosa (wife and daughter of Eugenio Scribani, divorced and estranged), together with his partner Giorgio and the latter's 12-year-old daughter Debora. Augusto is barely tolerated: he is a harmless man, but at times bizarre, and the only person he finds a bond with is the youngest child, his granddaughter. With her every conversation is easy and affection ever more intense: he accompanies her to school, becomes her confidante; he protects her at every opportunity. Augusto undoubtedly still indulges in some extravagance, perhaps even enjoying himself: after rejecting his ex-secretary's awkward marriage proposal, he appears in his pyjamas at a house party with important guests; he takes part in a television enquiry on the insane (after having fortuitously found his old comrade from the asylum Alcide who lives in Rome with his friend Ines, acting as an extra when it happens) and with whom he makes a sensational intervention. No longer able to cope with the climate at home and to avert the threat of his daughter-in-law who intends to send him back to the clinic, Augusto takes refuge in a farmhouse in the suburbs, where Alcide welcomes him: here he is joined by Rosa, who has run away from home, settling with her dear grandfather in the fields, as he is the only one who has managed to make her feel less lonely. After many days in happiness, the police intervene: the girl is put in a boarding school in Stresa, while Scribani retires (alone, but free) to a community of nuns in Piazza Farnese. In spite of everything, Augusto, who went to Stresa, manages to see Rosa again, who has meanwhile happily adapted to her new life. Then Scribani returns to his solitude: he has had the farewell kiss that succeeds in sweetening the melancholy of parting.
Vittorio Gassman, Dominique Sanda, Elliott Gould, Valentina Holtkamp, Eva Grimaldi
Dino Risi