La matassa

La matassa ("The skein") is a 2009 Italian comedy film written and directed by Giambattista Avellino and by Ficarra e Picone. The film was a box office success, ranking first for two weeks at the Italian box office and grossing $10,007,765.

Plot summary

The movie opens with Paolo (Picone), the owner of Albergo Geraci, standing on the roof and seeming like he's about to jump off as the firefighters and the local priest try to convince him to come down. A mysterious man (Claudio Gioè) climbs on a balcony and reveals he has to show him something important. He mentions that one of the papers is real and the others are what [Paolo's] cousin gave him.

Meanwhile, Gaetano (Ficarra), Paolo's cousin, rushes to the hotel to save his cousin. He sees the mysterious man, who taunts him, and seems perturbed. He walks in and Paolo tells him off.

They start fighting over the hotel's ownership, which had caused their father's fight thirty years before, after which Paolo and Gaetano hadn't seen each other until the funeral of Paolo's father, Gaetano's uncle.

The local priest starts narrating the events that took place in the last month.

Paolo, a weak and anxious man, is grieving his father's recent death while dealing with his hypochondria, while Gaetano owns an illegal marriage agency, which sets up immigrant women to marry Italian men so they have easy access to Italian and EU citizenships, thanks to the ius sanguinis principle.

He gets all his info about the men's health through his friend, the mysterious man who gave Paolo the real documents at the beginning of the movie, who works at a healthcare blood test centre, and he himself married an East-European woman, Olga (Anna Safroncik), who dislikes him and finds him idiotic, so much that she tells everyone they're only partners at work and is filing for divorce.