Synopsis

DUETTO takes place in Italy, in the coastal town of San Remo, during the Italian Song Festival of 1967. It tells the story of an imaginary and human encounter between Giuliano, a 13-year-old Brazilian boy, and the famous and controversial Italian singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco, hours before his death.

But the story begins in São Paulo. After a tragic car accident that kills his father, Gabriel and his mother Isabel travel with his 65-year-old paternal grandmother Lucia to her hometown, San Remo, known for its music festival. It is the 1960s and Italy is in the process of remaking itself after the war and exporting its romantic music to the world.

Lúcia goes to visit her sister Sofia, 60, to decide if they are going to sell the old family farm in San Remo, where they were both raised until they married. They haven’t seen one another for forty years.

Sofia, in San Remo, is a well-known chef at a traditional restaurant named after her husband Gino. He runs the place and their two sons, Francesco, 40, and Carlo, 27, tend the tables. During the festival it is popular among the competing singer-songwriters. But Francesco and Carlo always disagree about one thing: Francesco loves the Festival and the songs that it presents, while Carlo likes the protest music of Luigi Tenco, who was the first to voice Italian “anger”.

Lucia, Isabel and Giuliano arrive in the town in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the festival, and at the restaurant Giuliano meets the main singers in the competition, among whom Luigi Tenco. Gabriel is drawn to Tenco, because he reminds him of his father, who was also named Luigi. The singer invites him to his performance.

The theatre is full. Luigi Tenco and Dalida introduce themselves as “Ciao amore, ciao”. To Giuliano’s surprise, he is booed and receives little applause. He leaves the stage, very upset. At the end of the day’s performances, in which eleven songs classify for the main prize, Tenco’s song is not chosen. There is a feeling of great unease among the participants and Tenco leaves the theatre alone.

Giuliano goes home, where Isabel is waiting for him. Upset about Tenco’s lack of success, Giuliano has an argument with his mother and blames her for his father’s death. He had the accident after leaving the house irritated about a fight he’d had with Isabel. This revelation provokes a thorny argument between Isabel and Lúcia, which makes Giuliano run away.

Giuliano goes to the Hotel Savoy looking for Tenco and sees him heading for the beach. He goes over to him and they have an emotional conversation, in which Giuliano talks about this father’s death and Tenco tells him about the hardships of the adult world, the impotence of words and his dreams in the face of lies and concessions.

At the end, Tenco proposes they sing a “duetto”, saying that if he repeats the phrases in Italian, maybe they’ll both be relieved of their pain and believe once again in the power of words, of life, and of the love that they insist on holding onto and understanding. They sing together.

Tenco then asks Giulianoto go back to his mother. Giuliano pretends to leave, but follows Tenco. He sees him meet a man and watches him getting into a car parked on the seaside avenue.

When he returns home, Giuliano finds his worried mother and grandmother. But he doesn’t say anything. He goes to his room and to bed. When he wakes up the next morning, he receives news that Luigi Tenco is dead.

Perplexed, Giuliano goes to the Savoy again. He manages to get through the crowd of artists, journalists and police officers, and goes up to his room, where he sees Tenco’s body being removed. Among the bystanders, Giuliano recognises the man Tenco had met on the beach.

Immersed in the tangle of adult lives, problems and worries, Giuliano tries to investigate Tenco’s death, because he doesn’t believe he committed suicide, and tries to find a plausible person to blame in the face of the unbearable fragility of life and brutality of events. Just as he blames his mother for his father’s death, he now needs to find a logical and tangible person to blame for Tenco’s death. But his search doesn’t lead him to the truth about the singer’s death, which remains a mystery to this day, but he does end up discovering the truth about his father’s death and finally pardons his mother.

DUETTO has the structural elements of a thriller, set against the beautiful and important backdrop of 1960s Italian culture, but it is fundamentally a film that portrays the moving journey of a boy as he matures and moves toward adult life.