The Ties

Aldo tells his wife Vanda that he is with someone else and leaves the house. They have two children. Vanda comes apart; the anger, the letters, the phone calls, and being left in the middle with the children. After a while Aldo comes back. The film does not end there; it moves thirty years on. Aldo and Vanda are still together, older, coming home from a holiday. When they get in, the flat has been wrecked. The children are grown. Daniele Luchetti directs. The source is Domenico Starnone's novel. Luigi Lo Cascio plays the young Aldo and Alba Rohrwacher the young Vanda, with Silvio Orlando and Laura Morante as their older selves. It opened the Venice film festival in 2020. The structure rests on three views: first the period in which it happened, then the present, and finally the same story through the children. Each part changes the meaning of the one before. What it says is uncomfortable: staying together does not mean forgiving, and a marriage kept up for thirty years may be not a resolution but an account being settled. The strand with the children is the harshest; what their parents' fight left in them becomes visible only in the last section. Starnone's novel was much discussed in Italy, and the book itself uses the same structure. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian family drama and literary adaptation. Who it is not for: none of the characters are likeable, the tone is cold, and the film offers no consolation.