Paolo Genovese
The Place

Everyone asks for it, everyone wants it, but it's not Figaro. Unfortunately for them.

The Place is one of those cafés that have become familiar due to frequent indoor scenes featured in American movies: large windows, cushioned seats, a counter that stretches from the entrance halfway across the room.
The constant coming and going of people suggests that it is a much-frequented spot despite its location being presumably a quiet, anonymous place in our countryside.

And it is here, always sitting at the same steel table, that an enigmatic figure spends his days.
In his presence, a varied assortment of characters comes and goes, each eager to solve the situation afflicting them: from the elderly lady still too spry to resign herself to losing her sick husband to the nun not old enough to lightly accept her loosening relationship with God.
From the young father willing to do anything to see his son recover from the illness taking him away to the more seasoned one, a police officer determined to restore his relationship with his estranged son.

The man of mystery meticulously notes every single detail of these unfortunate souls' stories in a notebook, then closes it, stores it carefully, takes a moment to reflect, and dictates the solution.
Build an explosive device, place it in a crowded area, and detonate it.
Get pregnant, kill a child, cover up an investigation into a sexual assault case.

There is nothing in these tasks, assigned without further instructions, that doesn't clash with common moral principles or the professional ethics of his "clients."
Instead, there's something perverse in observing the stages that lead these people's desperation to become fright, then a sense of bewilderment at a crossroads, and finally a cold, lucid planning of events.

Victims of a wicked fate who in turn become a wicked fate for someone else.

But how can a pain, however excruciating, inhibit any form of hesitation regarding the damage that an incorrect conduct will cause from every point of view?
And is it worth paying a price as steep as the consequences that such conduct will bring upon oneself?

As they return to the nameless man's table in turns, updating his notebook with new notes on the progress of their respective missions, the protagonists each fade into the echo of their conscience, stepping back from them and unknowingly becoming a form of collective exercise that writes the ending from a completely different perspective, intertwining desires, aspirations, and hopes.

A lesson on the principle of free will, understood in its purely secular conception, which becomes an involuntary protagonist of the stories that only at a superficial glance appear as puppets moved for the amusement of a sadistic, perverse puppeteer.

The doctrine of grace, essential for man to achieve salvation, shatters along with its passionate or rational motives against the concept of inevitability.

A bitter epilogue can often be the only possible one and, due to some complicated mental mechanism, can even be recognized as the most plausible.