Franco Elica, a dissolute movie director, slides into despair after being asked--to his horror--to make yet another version of Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed. Complicating matters is news that a looming sexual-harassment scandal is about to break. Hoping to avoid the scandal at all costs, Franco flees to Sicily where he hides out in a small village. There he meets a host of colorful characters: a man who makes his living shooting souvenir wedding films, a film director who is faking his own death to finally achieve the fame that has eluded him all his life, and the cultured nobleman Prince Ferdinando Gravina di Palagonia. The menacing Prince, a huge fan of Franco’s movies, commissions the depraved filmmaker to shoot the wedding of his tempestuous daughter, Bona, with whom Elica quickly falls impulsively, idiotically, dangerously in love and whose wedding he becomes driven to sabotage at all costs.