Cinema brings the island to life … and the opening is a miserable “Italian” marriage!

Venice | As if the cinema had enchanted the island. As if it were a medicine! The island of Lido before the Venice International Film Festival was almost empty. With the start of the party days ago, shops were opened and the party’s visitors attended the meetings without fear. The masks have all but disappeared from the streets, restaurants and cafes, but the festival’s hygiene measures remain the same. Masks inside the Palace of Festivals and rooms. The spacing at the filming locations still prevails. A long wall has been erected around the red carpet to prevent the public, journalists and photographers who did not provide their health data from entering (but the wall did not stop them, the cameras in their hands were raised from behind the wall). Everything is going well except electronic reservation, as the administration forced everyone to reserve their seats in the hallways electronically (reserving three movies can take 30 minutes), it would have been easier if there was an app on the phones.

The opening ceremony of the festival was great. For the first time, the opening ceremony and the opening film are shown live in all cinemas in Italy. At the inauguration the directors of eight European festivals (Alberto Barbera (Venice), Carlo Chatrian (Berlin), Thierry Fremo (Cannes), Lee Lee Henstein (Locarno), Faina Calodrevich (Rotterdam), Karel Ouch (Karlovy Vary), José Luis Rebordinus (San Sebastián), Tricia Tuttle (London), who stood shoulder to shoulder “to reaffirm the importance of the art of cinema as a sign of solidarity with the world film industry, which has been seriously affected by the epidemic”, Barbera said.
The outer magic is not found in the opening movie. Italian cinema opened the festival for the first time in eleven years. The return of Italian cinema to the opening of the festival was not very successful. It seems that the wall that isolated the red carpet from the public’s curiosity, was the same one that the couple built around it in the film “Bonds” (outside the official competition) by Italian director Daniele Luccetti. The film is based on the novel of the same title, published in 2014 by Italian writer Domenico Stanoni. The film recounts the painful breakup of the marriage of Vanda (Alba Roacher) and Aldo (Luigi Lucasio). With the new anniversary of Noah Bompak’s film “A Marriage Story” in “The Almustra” last year, Luquette defied the breakup of the spouses and, throughout the film, continued to change her point of view.
We are in Naples, Vanda and Aldo’s marriage goes into crisis when Aldo falls in love with Lydia (Linda Caridi). Then we meet them again years later, still married and with two children. His confession of treason cost him, the expulsion from the house and the continuation of the love story with Lydia, away from his wife and children. The desire to see them again and his old emotions cause Aldo to return to Vanda and the boys. However, some things have not been fixed and life cannot go back to the way it was. But sometimes it walks to a bitter end by itself, because no one has the strength or the will to get angry and fight.
Love is not the only thing that unites a person, but there is something that remains even after the death of love. Spouses staying together is not about love. It could be out of hatred, out of shame, out of hatred, out of shame. The film tells us about the damage that love causes when it makes us suddenly change our decisions, attitudes and ways. And the worst is when he stops joining us. Luquette takes us from one side to another in time, each time giving us a part of the story. He chose to tell complex emotions through very close shots and was located in a very small space, indoors, small apartments and rooms, where the true tragedy occurs, which brings affliction and misery.
It is up to the viewer to reassemble the pieces of the story and order them to find out where they are and what sacrifices the couple made for their now adult children who share the story after these years. Behind closed doors, the director offers us an incomplete picture of the ideology of the family in an atmosphere loaded with dramatic tones that were easy to miss and not highlight. But the director gave in to him, forcing us to take a stand and explain a lot about the characters and their actions. As if he wanted to transfer every word from the book to the screen! Luquette tried to build a family mural, with scenes of emotional intensity. But because of his commitment to character composition, he moved his film into the region of clichés: the traitorous, selfish, cowardly man, the woman disturbed by family responsibilities and everyday emptiness, and the children traumatized by separation. In the end, we know very well the difficulty of translating a novel into a film, especially if the novel speaks of many complex and tangled feelings. Luquette tried a lot, but couldn’t … It seemed like she was translating the novel to the maximum, as if she had memorized the novel and the characters, but she didn’t understand it.

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