Riccardino has been separated for four years from his mother, a woman with strong personality disorders. Despite the thoughtful and attentive guidance of his educator, who wants to lead him towards a safe future in the family home, Riccardino decides to run away, join his mother and live with her.
The film tells, through the stories of four characters whose lives, in different forms and manners, are either changed or endangered by shoes, an object symbolizing desire par excellence, what we are willing to do to find our identity in the world, how far we go to be loved and accepted. It narrates a world where everyone desires what they don't have, where everyone wants to be what they are not.
It is the summer of 1982. Garance is eleven years old and lives in a remote hamlet in the Cevennes where her parents are trying to lead an alternative life. When two Italian activists rob a bank in the area, things go wrong. This event turns Garance and her family's life upside down.
Paris, France, 1979. Rose, a rebellious orphaned teenager, and Michel, a young aspiring painter, enjoy their crazy love under the neon lights of the decadent nightclub Le Palace, where they establish an ambiguous relationship with Lucille and Hubert, two bohemian bourgeois who will change their lives.
Eli has four children, an unemployed husband and a job with an almost impossible commute. Vale is single and makes ends meet by working in clubs as a dancer. Tied by a profound emotional bond of true sisterhood, the two women's lives are two sides of the same coin, but their mutual solidarity isn’t always enough to lighten the load of their difficult circumstances.
Agnese and Stefano are profoundly different. She is only seventeen, lives with her mother – a harsh and devoted woman – is a regular church-goer and is about to take a vow of chastity to last until marriage. He is twenty-five, has a violent temper and a difficult past behind. He works as a warden in a car park that borders a Roma camp. Their unexpected meeting engenders a true sentiment, made of little stolen moments and mutual help.
The story of four inmates during their 48 hours furlough, of their reality and how it has brought them behind bars. The characters are described with realism, with their contradictions, their desperation, the temptation of an escape, but the cornerstone of the movie is the sincerity of the positive feelings of each and everyone of them: the love of a father for his son, the love for a woman, for friends, and most of all the pursuit of a lost (if ever had) personal dignity and pride. Four characters of different ages and extractions, three man and a woman: Luigi, Donato, Rossana and Angelo.
A gangster known as "Samurai" wants to turn the waterfront of Rome into a new Las Vegas. All the local mob bosses have agreed to work for this common goal. But peace is not to last long.