La matassa ("The skein") is a 2009 Italian comedy film written and directed by Giambattista Avellino and by Ficarra e Picone.

[2] The movie opens with Paolo (Picone), the owner of Albergo Geraci, standing on the roof and seeming like he's about to jump off as the firefighters and the local priest try to convince him to come down.

Paolo, a weak and anxious man, is grieving his father's recent death while dealing with his hypochondria, while Gaetano owns an illegal marriage agency, which sets up immigrant women to marry Italian men so they have easy access to Italian and EU citizenships, thanks to the ius sanguinis principle.

He gets all his info about the men's health through his friend, the mysterious man who gave Paolo the real documents at the beginning of the movie, who works at a healthcare blood test centre, and he himself married an East-European woman, Olga (Anna Safroncik), who dislikes him and finds him idiotic, so much that she tells everyone they're only partners at work and is filing for divorce.

After the funeral, Paolo finds out his father was having problems with the Camorra, which helped pay rent by sending loans that need to be paid back.

It's after being told he only has weeks to live that Paolo becomes a daredevil, tried out bungee-jumping and asks out the woman he loves and, out of euphoria, punches and kicks the Camorra man who's come for the loan.

Paolo manages to call the police and set up an ambush where the Camorra men get arrested, but Gaetano still has to hold his end of the bargain and marries the Russian woman, since his wife has divorced him and taken control of the illegal marriage agency in the meantime.

In the end, Paolo and Gaetano are friends again and they both run the hotel together and they sit down to play cards as their fathers used to do thirty years ago.