Vivere

The Attorre family lives in a respectable suburb of Rome. Luca (Giannini) is a freelance journalist but barely makes ends meet, while Susi (Ramazzotti), a dancer, has been reduced to teaching overweight ladies. Lucilla, their six-year-old daughter, is quiet and imaginative, but suffers from asthma. One day Mary Ann (O'Donovan), an Irish art history student, comes to live with the Attorres as an au pair girl, upsetting the family's fragile coexistence.

"Charlie Chaplin used to say that there are happy marriages, but they are boring to watch on film. Where there's family conflict, there's a story: in film, in literature - it's always been that way, not just in Italian cinema. Anna Karenina is about a dysfunctional family, as is American Pastoral by Philip Roth, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, and Normal People by Sally Rooney. I could go on with the list! Out of this conflict, the stories then develop between the characters, all of whom are different from each other, but the driving force is the difficulty of being with those closest to us. The Attorre family is at loose ends: money worries, the little girl's asthma, the feeling of failing at work and of not being quite so young anymore; a house that has cracks but is still standing...