Nately Falls in Love with His Whore

Nately, a young, idealistic officer, falls deeply in love with a bored, indifferent prostitute in Rome. He pursues her obsessively, spending all his money on her. She is initially uninterested, but after a long sleep, she wakes up in love with him. Nately becomes possessive and tries to reform her, forbidding her to work and ordering her to stop seeing her friends. His love transforms him into a romantic idiot, and his attempts to control her only lead to conflict. The relationship is a tragicomedy of mismatched expectations and the impossibility of imposing conventional morality on a world at war.