His Days Are Numbered

Cesare is a plumber in Rome, past fifty, doing the same work he has done for years. One morning on the tram he watches a man his own age die of a heart attack. Everything changes in that moment. The next day he does not go to work. Nor the day after. He starts walking the city, talking to strangers, going back to places left over from his youth. He does not know what he is looking for; he only knows he does not want to spend the time he has left the way he has been spending it. Elio Petri directs, with Salvo Randone as Cesare. It is set in the Italy of the sixties, in the middle of the boom. It is not a story about retirement; it is a man looking at his own life from outside it for the first time.