Despite being an unplanned piece, it is a small, revealing and exceptional short film. It came after Europa ’51 and before La paura and Viaggio in Italia and in a way it is its masculine counterpart. It revolves around a painter (Orfeo Tamburi, as himself), Rossellini’s alter ego, to whom the director clearly gives his thoughts and morals. He has a foreign wife who does not share his ideas, or rather she does not even understand him. There is a cat which comes from Colette and which is key to the story, its true main character. (It was very rare at the time, apart from Disney’s anthropomorphism, for directors to demonstrate attention and respect for the animal world.) With a simplicity and rhythm (the screenplay) imposed by the short form, Rossellini moralizes through Tamburi. He directs in a similar way to La paura and imposes his vision of the world in a way which is not very Socratic but is very decisive, building tension bit by bit and clearly distinguishing between who understands what is to be understood and who will never understand.

                                                                                                                                               Goffredo Fofi