Daniele Luchetti has made some fine films, bit this one is a dispiritingly sour piece. When we first meet them, in the early 1980s, Aldo and Vanda, are a young couple living in Naples with two young children. Aldo pontificates about literature for RAI, and has fallen for Lidia, a young beauty who works there. There's a scene that involves tying shoelaces, but the ties the title really refers to are those that bind someone to their spouse/partner and the children they share. Lidia recognises that Aldo still feels their pull and sends him back to his wife and children.
We then fast forward to find Aldo and Vanda are in their sixties, and in the roles Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Cascio have been replaced by Laura Morante, still sensational, and Silvio Orlando, a Luchetti favourite. (There's the usual problem of finding it impossible to believe the younger versions would have evolved into the older ones.) It soon emerges that staying together hasn't turned out well, and their marriage has been unhappy for both of them. We're also meant to believe that it's been so toxic that their children, so delightful when young, have turned in middle age into a repellent pair, who treat their parents appallingly.
The action and direction are as excellent as one would expect, but the screenplay (written by Luchetti and two others, one the author of the original novel) is a turn-off. Its moral seems to be that a man should go wherever his lust takes him, and let his wife and children go hang. Maybe keep doing this until he can no longer attract young replacements, or the alimony payments get too much. Not attractive.
We then fast forward to find Aldo and Vanda are in their sixties, and in the roles Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Cascio have been replaced by Laura Morante, still sensational, and Silvio Orlando, a Luchetti favourite. (There's the usual problem of finding it impossible to believe the younger versions would have evolved into the older ones.) It soon emerges that staying together hasn't turned out well, and their marriage has been unhappy for both of them. We're also meant to believe that it's been so toxic that their children, so delightful when young, have turned in middle age into a repellent pair, who treat their parents appallingly.
The action and direction are as excellent as one would expect, but the screenplay (written by Luchetti and two others, one the author of the original novel) is a turn-off. Its moral seems to be that a man should go wherever his lust takes him, and let his wife and children go hang. Maybe keep doing this until he can no longer attract young replacements, or the alimony payments get too much. Not attractive.