Familia by Francesco Costabile, an Italian film in competition in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, is based on an autobiographical book that tells a true story. This title was chosen because, as the filmmaker has explained, “the Latin language refers to something worrying; the pater familias of Antique Rome was in fact the patron of slaves but also of mothers and children”. This film is indeed a chronicle of domestic violence that begins in the 1980s and lasts for over 15 years.
In Rome, Franco is about to get out of jail (9 years for robbery) and his ex and the mother of his children, Licia, changes the locks on her house. Franco intercepts the children, Luigi and Alessandro, in the courtyard, where they are playing football with other kids, and he takes them to the amusement park. Alessandro, a teenager, has a vivid memory of the beatings Franco gave his mother. Luigi, who is younger, is the one more attached to their father. Franco enters the house and terrorises Licia. It ends with the arrival of the police, his expulsion, and the two children literally torn from their mother’s arms and destined for a family home.
Years later, the youngest, Luigi, is affiliated to a group of neo-fascists. In a clash with boys from a social centre, Luigi stabbed one of his peers in the abdomen, was arrested and convicted. When he gets out of jail, he is contacted by his father who says he wants to start a new life with them. Alessandro is sceptical, and the opportunity offered by the family soon turns into a new nightmare. After a final confrontation between Luigi and his father, the epilogue will be dramatic: violence begets violence.
Played with great passion and incisiveness by all members of the cast – the young actor Francesco Gheghi and Barbara Ronchi (definitely consecrated by Kidnapped [+] and Non riattaccare [+]) are great, while Francesco Di Leva could successfully recite the Helsinki telephone book – the film is shot with a sure hand by Costabile, who had made his film debut with Una Femmina – The Code of Silence [+], about women victims of violence in the ‘Ndrangheta Calabrian clan, in competition in the Panorama section in Berlin. The main merit of the film – written by the filmmaker with Vittorio Moroni and Andriano Chiarelli – is precisely that it addresses a social theme – this time mostly from the point of view of the sons – which has entered the everyday debate, given the emergency of domestic abuse and femicides. The chosen style isn’t however that of social activist cinema. Costabile chooses the path of greater appeal to the large audience of the psychological thriller with forays into outright horror. The gloomy and sinister photography in interiors signed by Giuseppe Maio and the editing by Cristiano Travaglioli, and especially the original score by Valerio Vigliar, made of low and prolonged industrial sounds, don’t spare us transitions that are almost jump scares.
This option could be appreciated by a certain audience in the mood for stronger emotions and accepted with more hesitation by a more exigent public. The question is whether an immersive experience of 120 minutes in the brutality of a psychopathic subject to address domestic violence and its consequences on children was necessary. Giampaolo Letta, the film’s distributor, hopes that the film will be projected in schools and in cinemas without restrictions (6+). It’s doubtful family education is done by showing children a father à la Jack Torrance in The Shining.