Cooking with Fernet Branca

Cooking with Fernet Branca is a comic bad dream of modern Italy. Gerald Samper lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. An effete and snobbish Englishman working as a ghostwriter for celebrities, he would prefer to be remembered as a gourmet. His recipes include 'Mussels in Chocolate', 'Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream', and a dish containing pureed prunes, rhubarb, and smoked cat (off the bone). Reluctantly, Gerald shares his hillside with Marta. As far as he can see, she is a vulgar woman from a crime-ridden former Soviet republic. She is also a composer in the neo-folk style who is writing a score for a glamorous Italian film director - though Gerald can't believe it. The mutual misunderstandings of these two exiles, each in search of a crowning success in the sunlight of Tuscany, get ever more dangerous. To the music of black helicopters and bad opera, and oiled by large quantities of the bitter aperitif Fernet Branca - all that either of them ever seems to have around the house - the lives of these two unlikely neighbours gradually and disastrously intertwine.