In the distant past, Aldo betrayed Vanda and abandoned her children in Naples. In Rome he started again with Livia, a colleague and a kinder 'voice'. In between, two children, Anna and Sandro, who grow up and harbor a future of grudges. Vanda attempts suicide, Aldo does not give in to blackmail but a few years later he returns home and re-knots the loose ties. Aldo and Vanda come out of the crisis intact but it is only appearance. Looking at them closely, the cracks and repairs jump to the eye. The débâcle is around the corner, Anna and Sandro as well.
Inside a large apartment, now a vestige of a past harmony, they circulate between dribbles and confrontations, intoxicating the lives of their children. Vanda imposes rules, Aldo runs away from them, together they produce a chaotic situation, an open rift, a conflict in which everyone, in her own way, seeks the way out.
Lacci covers a period of forty years and is inscribed in a context of new times (the Eighties) of liberation of customs and the overthrow of the values of the traditional family. The title, an emotional and concrete anecdote of the story, alludes to the unfailing bonds that tie the characters and make them prisoners. To the tight knots intertwined by habits and shocks.
The interest in Daniele Luchetti's family drama lies above all in the originality and management of its narrative structure. Polyphonic structure that allows characters and thoughts to coexist fluidly. Between escapes, returns and collapses, the members of the protagonist family cause a domestic carnage that has its roots in the homonymous book by Domenico Starnone. But it is Daniele Luchetti's gaze that stages the hyperactivity of the feelings that stir the protagonist couple all the time, observing them in closed spaces in search of residual love and the anger that supplanted it.
The tension is constant and finds its detonation in the couple Laura Morante - Silvio Orlando, Vanda and Aldo at the bottom of marriage and years. Both of an extreme precision in restoring the strength of inertia and the slow wear and tear of the sentimental economy.
Directed by Daniele Luchetti.
A film with Alba Rohrwacher, Luigi Lo Cascio, Laura Morante, Silvio Orlando, Giovanna Mezzogiorno. Drama.
