Where it was filmed 'The First Day of My Life'

“I can’t guarantee that you will be happy, on any given day you’ll be a blazing light, on another you will not. But the only thing that really counts is that you are nostalgic about happiness. Maybe this way you will feel like searching it out.”

Paolo Genovese moved the setting of his novel The First Day of My Life from New York to Rome for the film, giving the city a mysterious look, with dark tones and colours, almost supernatural in feel.

Castel Sant’Angelo is the first frame of an Eternal City that – on a ghostly night – watches four individuals who have nothing in common but the desire to kill themselves almost at the same moment: a man who coaches others (Valerio Mastandrea); a police officer (Margherita Buy); a former gymnast who lost the use of her legs (Sara Serraiocco); and overweight boy (Gabriele Cristini). That night, in the pouring rain, they find themselves together, all “guests” of a mysterious individual (Toni Servillo) who picked them up in the very moment that they were ending their existences, asking for a week to make them change their minds about how they see their lives.

The next day, the four watch the recovery of a body of one of them from the river Tiber, near Riva Ostiense, in the shadow of the gazometro. In the days that follow, in different ways, they begin to become aware of what they have done and face their pain, weaknesses and desires. Under the porticoes of piazza Vittorio Napoleone pushes Emilia’s wheelchair until the girl is forced to admit what her mind refuses to accept. He watches impotently his wife’s feelings of guilt during his funeral at the Church of St. Paul within the Walls, whose Gothic-Romanesque façade of white and red stripes looms in via Nazionale. The platform of the metro B line at Termini station is the setting for his new attempt at suicide: saved by a man whom he had encouraged to open up to the world while singing Leonard Cohen’s immortal Hallelujah.

The most carefree of the 7 days takes place at the seaside on the storied fishing platforms, overlooking the old lighthouse of Fiumicino: here the man makes clam pasta for his four guests who can neither eat nor drink. Scenes were set in Cinecittà Est, in particular outside the Church of San Gioacchino e Anna and near a flower shop in via Rizzieri, and outside Rome, in at Castel Madama in the Aniene valley. The interiors were built on the soundstages at Cinecittà Studios.