AN EARLY SCENE FROM FAMILIA

OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - FRANCESCO COSTABILE: FAMILIA (2024)

Costabile's Familia has won thirteen nominations and six awards, but only in Italy, at Venice and the Donatello awards; it is a very Italian film. At first it seems a mere melodrama, but it is a tragedy., a modern one.

I began with the melodrama idea and thought, "Netflix movie." And then I realized it was an Italian tragedy with a modern sociological understanding brought to such a high, fascinating pitch I didn't want it to end. If you are anything like me, you will not mind its two-hour length.

With our modern underdstanding of family tragedy so we think it is doomed because it is dysfunctional. It's tormented by abuse, but never quite destroyed. The two sons stand by the mother and remain in contact with the father. It is based on the memoir of Luigi Celeste, Nonsarà sempre così. The father, Franco, is played here compellingly by Francesco Di Leva, who, with several other cast members, have received awards. Di Leva has the face of one who must have been handsome in youth but now seems worn and dangerously hardened. He is convincing as this man with a compulsive obsession about his little family, who frightens both his two sons and their hard working mother. The opening is at an early time when the two sons are only boys. Frando'w wife Licia (an excellent Barbara Ronchi) has taken steps to formallly eliminate Franco from family responsibility and changed the lock on the door. She wants to have no more to do with him, and to cut him off from their two sons, the older Luigi (Francesco De Lucia, as a boy, later Francesco Gheghi) and schoolboy Allesandro (Stefano Valentini then, later Marco Cicalese). He is a machinist but has gone to jail for an attempted bank robbery.

Licia's steps eventually cause the caribinieri to come and not only take away Franco, who goes to prison, but the two sons, who are ripped also from their mother and have to spend four years apart even from each other. This segment ends with this horrific scene of running and being chased down. This is where the film feels like it loves nothing but vionece and shouting, melodrama.

Francesco Costabile has opted for high pitched but less surreal and poetic style here than in her 2022 Code of Silence/Una Femmina ([url="https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4929"]Open Roads 2022[/url]), though Frederico Rizzo in the Italian movie website [url="https://www.sentieriselvaggi.it/familia-di-francesco-costabile-2/"]Sentieri Selvaggi[/url] observes that the "dreamlike and symbolic aspect" is "fundamental to Costabile's way of making cinema." This one is less dreamy, however, as well as in more mainstream Italian as well. Sometimes Italian film critics seem more fascinated with their own theories about films than the films themselves.

This is Rome, a grim, working class part of it with old buildings that have no beauty. In the next segment boys, out to play, are lured by their father, now out of prison, who approaches them unknown by Licia. Alessandro tries to follow his mother aat first and reject him but when he takes the too poor kids to an amusement park for rides and games all afternoon, and shows the boy hos to shoot a pistol to knock down objects he gives in, and they have a hart time explaining their long absence to Lizia and the big teddy bear Alessandro won.

Soon Franco has forced his way back into the family, through the oboys, who let him in, deapite the changed lock. Life with him is impossibly. Franco is jealous and suspicous over nothing: he thinks her boss is having sex with her. She like other abused women is addicted somehow to her abuser, as well as afraid of him.

In the next segment, Luigi, who repressed his trauma, has begun to play it out by joining a neofascist skinhead band. The film gives way for a while to surging episodes of shouuting and chanting, Luigi gets muscles and tattoos, but still he lives with his mother. He also acquires a girlfriend, Giulia (Tecla Insolia, who won a most promising young actor award, and has fans already), sweet and innocent but also tough. She knows of Luigi's fascist period but hopes he has gotten over it. (The Open Roads blurb may be right that the memoir is "a staggering account of the author’s falling in with a group of ultra-right-wing skinheads," the movie is about the tragedy of a family.)

A memorable scene is one where Giulia comes to dinner at home with Luigi's mother, father, and brother and there is a fight between Franco and Licia, hidden behind doors. The couple has to leave early. This is a good picture of how family violence seeps out to others even when they are trying to hide it. Luigi will believe to the end that he is not like his father though that fear is raised.

The drama goes on and on because Franco keeps getting kicked out and forcing his way back into the famiy and the two young men remain living with their mother, while her fear of him and subjection to him are vividly whown. A climax comes after Franco comes to threaten Luigi at his workplace, and reveals that he is carrying a knife - which later he reveals he sleeps with at their home under his pillow. The screenplay very neatly and quietly but suspensefully builds to a pitch of danger here.

Familia premiered at Venice in its Orizzonti section Sept. 1, 2024, with many award nominations, opening to admiring reviews in Italy a month later. It has opened in Brazil and France and shown at several Italian film series. It got four awards at Venice, Best Casting and Best Actor for Francesco Gheghi, Best Film for Francesco Costabilie, Best Young Actor for Tecla Insolita, and another award for the director. It got nine Davide di Donatello nominations but only one award, to Francesco Di Leva for Best Supporting Actor.I It was screened for this review as part of the Open Roads italian film series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025. Showtimes:

Sunday, June 1 at 8:30pm
Thursday, June 5 at 8:45pm

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.