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and

Valentina Cervi Valentina Cervi (born 13 April 1976) is an Italian film and television actress. Cervi was born in Rome. She is the daughter of director Tonino Cervi and granddaughter of actor Gino Cervi. Her mother is the Italian producer of Austrian-Hungaria ...

. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name by

Niccolò Ammaniti Niccolò Ammaniti () is an Italian writer, winner of the Premio Strega in 2007 for '' As God Commands'' (also published under the title ''The Crossroads''). He became noted in 2001 with the publication of '' I'm Not Scared'' (''Io non ho paura'' ...

. The film was released on 12 November 1999 to negative reviews.

Plot

Terminally ill with cancer, Marco Donati only has three months to live and decides to work in an abandoned aquarium in Rome. He receives a letter from India from a mysterious person named Mrs. Margareth, who asks him to build the largest aquarium in Delhi. While in India, he has strange encounters with a new group of friends.

Cast

Production

made his acting debut with this film. The film was shot for around four weeks in

Madras Chennai, also known as Madras ( its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian ce ...

and

Genoa Genoa ( ; ; ) is a city in and the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, and the sixth-largest city in Italy. As of 2025, 563,947 people live within the city's administrative limits. While its metropolitan city has 818,651 inhabitan ...

Reception

A critic from ''

Mymovies MYmovies.it is a website dedicated to Italian cinema. Established in 2000, the website contains a database on Italian films and television series and actors with films from 1895 to present. The website also features reviews of up and coming films ...

'' rated the film one out of five stars. A critic from ''Film UP'' wrote that "The character of Marco is an attempt to describe what is commonly believed to be today's young people with a sense of malaise and existential discomfort, which are manifested by the disease. The trip to India is in a certain sense the liberation from all those constraints that this stereotype would feel from the society surrounding it. In these places you breathe differently, it is a world where spirituality is felt more than the material sense that is experienced in the West".

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, 0184302 Italian romantic comedy films 1990s Italian films Films based on Italian novels Films based on works by Niccolò Ammaniti