Daniele Luchetti
LACCI

Luigi "Baustelle" Lo Cascio and Alba Krombacher are a happy bourgeois couple: high-end leather goods, sepia tones, two good children, Sandro and Anna, no electric light in the house, evenings spent playing Scrabble by the light of a vintage Feuerhand and leeching the audio of the Eredità from the neighbors' house.

But this secluded life gives Luigi anxiety. Understandably so.
To rejuvenate himself and find the version of himself from the early albums, he starts a relationship with a hipster a few years younger, and sadistic but honest, he confesses to his wife Alba. That alone would be a problem. The point is that Alba might be willing to forgive if it weren't for the fact that Luigi has fallen in love with the young woman. We see them playing and taking provocative instant Polaroids, and when two people reach the point of taking instant photos, it means they have reached maximum harmony, as the refills are expensive and you cannot risk wasting anything. We also see them playing with a nannolo, a strange wooden artifact. Not what you're thinking, hehe, a type of mini-drawer where they store their Polaroids, which we then see rise to the role of objective correlative: to illustrate the poetics.

Alba (remember, sister of Alice, director of unpalatable whoppers like Lazzaro Felice, which I recommend watching if you have cracks in your house that need filling because it stuccos so well) from then on completely loses her composure, she snaps, slaps, pulls in the street, gives herself to the destruction of the prestigious furnishings of their central home with a view of the cathedral, personally kidnaps Luigi who had expressed the desire to leave.
The children, who for obvious reasons were already not in good spirits, become even sadder (we see Sandro intensely looking at the sky from a car window: a big metaphor for escape), then they grow up to become Giancarlo Giannini and Giovanna Mezzogiorno, obviously full of troubles.
Yes, because Lacci unfolds on two different temporal planes: the usual eighties and a dystopian future (for poor Lo Cascio) where the reunited couple Alba and Luigi are incarnated by Laura Morante and Silvio Orlando, whom we see looking pensively at the sea (big metaphor for escape) and hear pronouncing with his nasal voice an utterly arbitrary maxim about love, as is customary in sentimental dramas: "to be together, you must speak little. The indispensable."

Ah, you might say, but then the instant photos were the only possible photographic solution, not a hipster move! Nonsense: film rolls were already used in the eighties, as well as electric light, it's just that set designers, when reconstructing the past, get carried away and create these blunders where there is an emporium of vintage objects without context. Instead, the Eredità actually wasn't there, my mistake.

What to say. Daniele Luchetti signs an intense drama that promises bondage and does not deliver, supported by the caliber of the actors, natural lights, elegant photography, etc., which together with the subtitled Favolacce paints a merciless portrait of parental roles and all that jazz. Potentially, a masterpiece.