The Full Monteverdi is a 2007 British film written and directed by John La Bouchardière and based on his live production of the same name, itself based on Claudio Monteverdi's fourth book of madrigals (1603) which, in turn, is a collection of settings of poems by such Italian Renaissance poets as Giovanni Battista Guarini, Ottavio Rinuccini and Torquato Tasso. The film features the British vocal ensemble I Fagiolini and the original cast of actors from the live production. The title is a play on the name of the 1997 film The Full Monty – a pun vindicated, according to academic Peter Conrad, by The Full Monteverdi's "raw, emotional striptease".The plot concerns six couples who are breaking up simultaneously in a restaurant. During the course of their meals, revelations about the past drive the couples to separation. The apparently avant-garde structure and nonlinear narrative of the film are based in the musical material, which is often of highly contrapuntal polyphony, and follows the stories of the different couples in a manner similar to the vocal interchanges in the madrigals.