It stars Toni Servillo, Olivia Magnani, Adriano Giannini, Gianna Paola Scaffidi, and Raffaele Pisu.

In the film, Titta Di Girolamo (Servillo), a mysterious and brooding Italian ex-businessman, begins a relationship with Sofia (Magnani), the barmaid at the Swiss hotel where he lives.

Titta Di Girolamo is a middle-aged loner who has spent the last eight years living in an upmarket hotel in Lugano, Switzerland.

In the morning, he solves the chess puzzles in the paper and in the evening he plays Grabber with a bankrupt aristocratic couple who are marooned in the hotel they used to own.

He develops feelings for Sofia, the beautiful and stylish waitress at the bar of the hotel but he refuses to speak to her because, in his shyness, he fears that love would complicate his monotone but quiet life.

By way of punishment, Titta was forced to live for the rest of his life as a mafia pawn, making regular deliveries of suitcases full of money to a Swiss bank.

His bluff achieves the intended result: in order to avoid offending him, and partly out of fear of the Mafia, the bank staff pretend that they miscounted, and so his theft goes unreported.

However, when Sofia fails to turn up to celebrate his birthday, a despondent Titta, thinking that no-one loves him, leaves for the airport early.

The film ends with Titta being lowered into the concrete and thinking of his long-lost best friend Dino, who works as an electrician in the Alps.

On the other hand, Richard M. Porton at Chicago Reader argues that "Sorrentino's often playful assault on genre conventions is sabotaged by an ostentatious visual style that [...] is little more than a bag of empty tricks.