‘A Common Story’ Venice Review: Alba Rohrwacher Anchors an Italian Marital Drama

The so-called «empty nest syndrome» is the driving force behind A Common Story, the directorial debut of actress Anna Foglietta. The film follows an Italian couple who, after their daughter leaves for university, have to relearn how to live together and confront a reality that suddenly feels very different from the one they’ve known for years. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s a classic domestic drama about a subject that doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

Foglietta approaches the material with a relatively unusual formal sensibility, especially considering how traditional the premise appears. Long takes, a handful of striking stylistic gambles, extended silences, faces, bodies and spaces that seem to speak for themselves. This isn’t simply another relationship drama about a couple nearing fifty and contemplating separation. It’s also a film about the world they inhabit, and the way those emotional distances are inscribed into the spaces around them.

The great Alba Rohrwacher plays Erika, a woman who has clearly devoted much of her life to raising her daughter and who suddenly finds herself confronted with the prospect of having free time. The problem is, she has no idea what to do with it. Erika works part-time as a supermarket cashier, but most of her days revolved around her family and around helping her widowed mother. She gradually realizes that Mauro (Guido Caprino), her husband, is incapable of filling that void —or of rebuilding the connection they presumably once shared. The frustration keeps growing.

Mauro, meanwhile, barely notices what’s happening. His own life becomes complicated for different reasons. His stubborn, often aggressive father has decided to shut down the family business where they both worked, forcing Mauro to scrape together a living through odd jobs and home repairs. On top of that, he coaches young kids just starting out in calcio. He may feel a similar emptiness, but he has no way of expressing it. In fact, when Erika first opens up about her personal crisis, his immediate reaction is anger, lashing out at her instead of listening.

A Common Story offers some intriguing visual ideas, but narratively it rarely strays from familiar territory: the overwhelmed, unhappy housewife versus the husband who’s absorbed by work and oblivious to everything else. She cleans and cooks while he comes home expecting dinner to be waiting on the table. She discovers pleasure in small rituals—putting on face cream, masturbating, something that seems to have become part of her life only after turning forty. He leaves his things scattered around the house, takes responsibility for very little, and flirts with the mothers of the boys he coaches. At times it feels as though you’re watching a film set several decades ago. But no—this is happening now.

In that sense, Una storia feels somewhat old-fashioned, as though it were arguing with an outdated understanding of masculine and feminine roles. Not so much because of what happens —you imagine there are still millions of households that function this way— but because of how the characters respond to these changes and discoveries. Mauro simply can’t grasp Erika’s complaints and carries on as though nothing were wrong. And Erika, in what is perhaps the film’s finest scene, breaks down and asks herself —and him— «Is this all there is?»

The film’s greatest strengths lie in its performances —Rohrwacher has an extraordinary ability to move you with the smallest gesture— and in the formal challenges Foglietta sets for herself. Her use of deep focus, her play with shifting planes of focus, and the occasional Ozu-like shots that linger on household objects longer than expected give the film a distinctive texture. If the drama itself sometimes slips into overly familiar territory, Foglietta has enough command of mise-en-scène to pull the viewer out of the routine of the standard marital-crisis narrative. It may not be enough to make A Common Story a great film, but it’s enough to slightly distort what might otherwise have been something far more predictable.