Synopsis
EASY
by Andrea Magnani
Isidoro (Easy) is in his mid 30s. As a young promise in car races, his carrier was definitely over when he started piling up weight so badly that he just couldn't fit into the car anymore. From that moment, everything in his life has been going wrong: jobless and a collection of anxiolytics and antidepressants. He lives with his mother, whose only love is her other son, Filo, a man of success who visits her only for Sundays' lunches.
Easy finds a way out thanks to a job proposal from his brother. A simple and clean little job, as Filo puts it, which consists in transporting the coffin of Taras, an Ukrainian bricklayer, from Italy, where he died falling from a structure in a building yard, to a small village in the Ukrainian mountains, where he was born and where his family is waiting for him.
But Easy's journey is far from tranquil. Just after the border between Hungary and Ukraine, Easy gets lost and can't find the right direction in that unknown world, where even the alphabet is incomprehensible for him. And, as if that hadn't been enough, two guys coming out from nowhere steal Easy's hearse. Alone and with nothing on him, he finds the coffin just around the bend, and his first reaction is to deliver the coffin to a police station and wait for Filo to get him out trouble, as he has always done.
But after meeting first a Chinese family that owns a Chinese-Ukrainian restaurant in the middle of nowhere, and then a priest living his last day of service before joining a rock band, Easy understands that he should dare for something more, and take back his life. Perhaps because he knows deep inside that that coffin and that journey are all that is left to him.
With his coffin, he gets to know a new world, through strange encounters and funny situations he’s caught in; he travels by truck, chart, on foot, floating on a river, and it doesn't matter if now is running on forklifts or with a Zaporozec, the important thing is that he is running again. The search for Taras' village suddenly becomes the search for a mysterious woman whose name appears in Taras' will. And when Easy finally finds her, he gets to understand more about Taras' past, and the past of those lands. But that is not Taras' village anymore, his family moved many years before. So Easy's journey continues, and after a hopeless attempt to bury Taras' coffin in a war cemetery, almost by chance he finds Taras' village, in the midst of the Carpathian forests.
The whole village welcomes Easy as a hero. It is time to bury the traveling companion. In the village's tiny cemetery, there is a lot to do before the burial, and Easy suddenly finds himself with a baby just a few months old in his arms. Easy is taken aback, the little one opens her eyes, and smiles. Easy stares at her, dazed. The horizon stretches before them, as if they were the only ones in the world.