Ties

“In case you’ve forgotten, dear sir, let me remind you: I am your wife”. These are the first lines of a letter which Vanda writes to her husband, who has fled home and left Vanda feeling helpless in a storm of impotent rage. They’d gotten married in the early 70s when they were young, because they wanted to be independent. And then the world changed. Being in your thirties with a family to take care of has become more a sign of backwardness than independence. Now he is in Rome, in love with the ethereal elegance of a stranger, while she is in Naples with the children, left to measure the silence and a growing sense of unfamiliarity. What are we willing to sacrifice, in order to avoid feeling trapped? And what do we lose when we choose to retrace our steps? This is a well-crafted story that speaks to those invisible ties which join one person to another. Sometimes a small gesture is all it takes to bring something we’ve tried to set aside back to life.

Domenico Starnone gives us a touching and deeply intense story, a masterful tale of an escape, a return, and all our failures: those that seem to be insurmountable, and those that keep us company throughout our lives.

«We’ve both learned that in order to live together we must say much less to one another, than what we hide».