Cortemaggiore, Italy, April 1962.
Italy’s public oil company, Agip, has begun extracting oil from its first domestically sourced oil field. Thus a small town of the Po Valley is becoming the symbol of the Italian “Economic Miracle”. The air is soaked in hope and gasoline.
Enrico is one of the young engineers hired to operate the massive oil refinery. Despite an introverted character, his technical talent as a plant maintenance manager is about to burst open his horizons. When beautiful and ambitious Wanda meets him on the smoky dance floor of the Barino, it’s love at first sight. Within a few months they get married and settle down in a charming little house overlooking the refinery.
And yet their marriage is not a happy one. The view of the refinery fire gas torch is not that romantic and Wanda is craving for escape. Her dream is a big family, a new car and a beach house in a small town by the Adriatic. But Rino is an engineer at heart and, beside his wife, he only has a great passion in life: his radio. His self-built home station, equipped with a powerful eight-element antenna, is the only place where he can find some relief by connecting radio ham operators from all over the world. If not for Manfredo, an exuberant Roman colleague, and his feisty wife Betty, the couple would not have a social life. Wanda feels betrayed: Enrico should have married his radio instead of her. No wonder he can’t even give her a baby.
After a ritual argument, Enrico retires to his radio, scanning the frequencies, when he suddenly hears the voice of a Russian woman, desperately crying.
Enrico manages to record the message just before the connection is lost. The next day, with the help of a fellow radio ham operator, I1MAB, he finds out an outstanding truth. The mysterious call did not come from a station or ship anywhere on Earth. Months before Valentina Tereshkova is acclaimed as the first woman cosmonaut, Enrico has heard the voice of Ludmila, a Soviet cosmonaut lost in space.
Ludmila is in great danger. She is orbiting around the Earth but a severe technical failure has blown her Vostok capsule off course, cutting off all contact with mission control. Enrico promises to help her and reveals his finding to the Carabinieri, but the Italian bureaucracy is dumb and deaf and he is ignored. In the hope to alert the Soviet authorities, he turns to Magnani, an Italian journalist affiliated to the Communist Party. This however turns out to be the wrong move, as Enrico earns a spot on the watchlist of the Soviet secret services. In times of Cold War, the failure of a Soviet space mission must be denied at all costs.
Enrico powers up his equipment and manages to connect Ludmila regularly in the following nights, although for a few minutes, every time she flies over Cortemaggiore. The cosmonaut is desperate: her spacecraft is experiencing more and more technical problems. Failing to receive guidance from mission control, she is doomed to die in space or crash on Earth's surface. In addition, revealing her troubles to a western radio ham operator has made her a traitor to the Nation. She can no longer expect help from her own people.
Enrico comforts her each and every night, so neglecting his friends, his job and even his own marriage. The cosmonaut becomes his obsession and he soon falls in love with her. In the meantime, Wanda feels alienated and lonely. Marino becomes her attentive confident and eventually a passionate lover.
While even his long-time friend MAB turns his back to him, Enrico finally manages to give an interview to the Italian television. During a live show, he claims to be in permanent contact with a Soviet cosmonaut in need for help. Although the story enjoys initial traction, Magnani's unexpected intervention ridicules Enrico and depicts him as a popularity-seeking impostor. Enrico thus realizes that Magnani is also a Soviet spy and the only one who could help Ludmila is himself alone.
Orbit after orbit, the cosmonaut is using up her oxygen and losing her residual hope. She is about to risk it all, by attempting a blind reentry to Earth, when Enrico convinces her to give him a last chance. On the basis of the Vostok's altitude, speed and position, he thinks he can find out precisely when to fire the retro-rockets to bring the capsule back to Earth safely, anywhere near Cortemaggiore. For a whole day Enrico is consumed with calculating the landing coordinates, but the following night, when he is about to send them up to Ludmila, his antenna is destroyed by Magnani.
Everything is lost. The Vostok's oxygen supply will run out long before Ludmila could cross two more times the sky over Enrico's radio station. But when MAB comes back to make up with him, he has an idea. Ludmila can attempt a reentry along a different orbit, off the Adriatic coast, a few minutes before the oxygen is up. With MAB's help, Enrico works day and night to rebuild his antenna and 24 hours later he frantically sends the new coordinates into space. This time Ludmila does not answer: she may be passed out, or be already dead. Nonetheless Enrico jumps in his car, heading to the Adriatic Sea. A few hours later he is sitting on a desert beach, anxiously waiting for the cosmonaut.
Eventually, long after the expected time, an orange parachute appears in the sky and Ludmila gently falls in the water. Enrico is filled with joy. He pulls her on a dinghy and dramatically escapes the Soviet spies on their chase.
Enrico and Ludmila end up in a motel room by the sea, where they make love for the first time. The same night, the Soviet spies break into Enrico’s house and kill two lovers in bed. It's a tragic mistake: Marino and Wanda are the wrong people in the wrong place. The Carabinieri find Enrico in his hiding place and arrest him for the murder of his unfaithful wife.
In the meantime, Ludmila has disappeared. Officially, no one but Enrico has ever seen her. Overwhelmed by guilt for having destroyed Wanda and Marino’s lives, he is advised by his lawyer to forget about the cosmonaut and confess his crime, in the hope of a benevolent verdict. In fact, thanks to the old, mild Italian law on the so-called “crimes of honour”, Enrico is only sentenced to 5 years behind bars. Some months later he is sitting in his cell, wondering whether Ludmila has ever existed at all, when he is surprised by an unexpected visit.
Across a heavy glass barrier in the visiting room, he can barely recognise Ludmila, disguised as an Italian peasant. She is pregnant, her belly carrying Enrico’s child.