Director

Daniele Luchetti

Italy | 2020 | 100 min | Italian

• Producer Beppe Caschetto, Valentina Merli
• Production Company IBC Movie, Rai Cinema, Misia Films
• Screenplay Domenico Starnone, Francesco Piccolo, Daniele Luchetti  
• Cinematography Ivan Casalgrandi
• Editing Daniele Luchetti, Ael Dallier Vega
• Sound Carlo Missidenti
• Cast Alba Rohrwacher, Luigi Lo Cascio, Laura Morante, Silvio Orlando, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Adriano Giannini, Linda Caridi
• Contacts

  Mk2 Films

  intlsales@mk2.com

About the Film

Italian drama The Ties was the first local film to open the Venice Film Festival since 2009. It is based on a book by Neapolitan writer (and co-screenwriter) Domenico Starnone, which tackles adultery and later-life regrets set over a 35-year period. Directed by veteran filmmaker Daniele Luchetti, the film features a strong cast including Alba Rohrwacher and Laura Morante.

The Ties follows the lives and the troubled relationship of a married couple who end up separating but can never quite find themselves breaking the ties that hold them together. The story also tracks the harm the complex relationship inflicts on the couple’s two children.

Set in the 1980s, the first part of the film is seen from the point of view of betrayed wife Vanda (Rohrwacher), who is stunned when an unrepentant Aldo (Luigi Lo Cascio), her husband of 12 years, admits that he has been sleeping with Lidia (Linda Caridi), a woman that he works with. Some 30 years later—and with Laura Morante as an older and embittered Vanda and Silvio Orlando as a much relaxed Aldo—we witness that things have not gone well, despite the fact that the couple stayed together.

It becomes clear, via some flashbacks, that Lidia was not quite the evil ‘other woman’ as initially presented, and that Vanda and Aldo have not found a way to make each other happy. The final part of the film features the adult versions of their two children who show resentment and anger towards their parents.

Deborah Young wrote in The Hollywood Reporter: “Particularly noteworthy in the classy tech work are Andrea Castorina’s sets, where almost all the story takes place. There is Vanda and Aldo’s crowded, ugly Neapolitan apartment; Lidia’s airy open-space digs where the floor-to-ceiling picture windows cry freedom; and Aldo and Vanda's final bookish apartment that becomes the scene of burglary and mayhem.”

Mark Adams