You can tell a lot about someone from their handwriting. Mète (Andrea Bosca) knows this because he's a graphologist, a handwriting specialist who is called upon to identify cases of forgery and false wills. He might be an expert in identifying character traits in handwriting, but Mète's own life is not so easily categorised. He's a bit too uptight however to fit into a baffling group of people that his colleague Bruno (Claudio Santamaria) calls 'gli sfiorati', 'drifters' whose personality and writing seems to change from one line to the next.
The idea of the drifter in handwriting is a good metaphor and it helps establish where Gli Sfiorati is going when it seems to be drifting itself. You can see that Mète has issues around the loss of his mother and a sense of abandonment by his father, but it still doesn't really account for him wanting to keep out of the way of his half-sister Belinda (Miriam Giovanelli) who has come to stay in his apartment during the preparations for his father's new wedding. Nor does it explain why he can scarcely summon up any interest in the hottest girl in Rome (Asia Argento), who is crazy about him.
With some episodes involving his estate agent friend Damiano (Michele Biondino) extending the theme, there's a sense that Gli Sfiorati is referring to a drifting generation in a wider sense; a generation without roots and tradition, where money is all that matters and can buy happiness and otherwise inaccessible women. But for how long can you drift on that basis? The matter baffles Bruno, but you get a sense that he and Mète probably think too much, examining the surface handwriting without actually reading what is written for real clues.
It's amusing to consider this as a solution while you wait for Mète to figure out what is wrong with his life, because Matteo Rovere film doesn't offer much in the way of clues, appropriately finding a rhythm that exists outside of any conventional narrative exposition. The solution provided however comes across as a little too neat without really finding any satisfying explanation for gli sfiorati or why Mète might be about to join their number. Maybe it's just Youth, or maybe we all have the potential to be gli sfiorati.
