Vivere

The term “family” comes from the Latin word, familia, for a group of household servants and slaves. Centuries later, our pater familias is Luca Attorre, a freelance journalist, a hack who struggles to get his features published in the papers. In a respectable suburb made up of row houses, he is unable to maintain Susi, a ballerina reduced to teaching dance to overweight women, and Lucilla, their quiet and imaginative six-year- old daughter who suffers from severe bronchial asthma. They are helped economically by Pierpaolo, Luca’s seventeen-year-old son from a previous relationship. Pierpaolo lives in an Art Nouveau house with his mother and grandfather, an important trial lawyer of cases linked to politics who rakes in several million euros a year. In the setting of a magnificent and incomprehensible Rome, both a good mother and a bad one, Mary Ann, a deeply Catholic student of art history from Ireland, au pair for the little Lucilla, is caught in the middle. In uniting with Attorre, over a year-long stay filled with ties of friendship and of licit and illicit love, Mary Ann discovers that in the Italy she had studied and idealised good and evil have negotiable boundaries. (Venice International Film Festival)