È andata così

 The judges of normality are present everywhere. — Michel Foucault 

Three former partners, two children, a woman in crisis and a theatrical performance that is supposed to help everyone confront their ghosts. It is not the beginning of a particularly conventional group therapy session, but it is the premise of È andata così, Gianni Zanasi’s film, which chooses the family as a testing ground for the absurd. 

Cecilia does not simply have three past relationships behind her: she has three men who are still present in her life. The relationships have ended, but an event brings them all back to the same place. The four adults thus find themselves sharing a space and a host of unresolved issues that cannot simply be filed away under separation. 

This is neither a traditional family nor a particularly harmonious alternative model. It is a family that has organised itself as best it could, in which affection survives romantic failures and their uneasy coexistence seems to follow its own logic, however difficult it may be for anyone assessing it from the outside to understand. 

The situation becomes more complicated when social services and psychiatry enter the picture, tasked with determining whether the environment is suitable for the daughter’s upbringing. At that point, private dysfunction becomes a public matter: who decides what constitutes a normal family? And, above all, what criteria distinguish an environment that is merely eccentric from one that is genuinely harmful? 

Here lies one of the film’s most interesting ideas. Cecilia’s family is not automatically better because it defies convention, nor is it worse because it fails to conform to it. The point is not to count the parents, check whether a stable couple is present or ensure that every role has been properly assigned. It is to understand what happens within these relationships, how much space is left for the children, and to what extent love can be distinguished from the need to hold on to others. 

Cecilia, after all, is not simply a woman who rejects rules. She is a desperate woman who has gone so far as to attempt to kill herself and everyone else in order to keep them together. Her story introduces a contradiction that the film could have explored more precisely: the desire to preserve both her own autonomy and a family at the same time can become paradoxical. Affection is no guarantee of balance, and the fact that people love one another does not make everything that happens between them harmless. 

It is in this context that the choice of Ibsen’s Ghosts becomes significant. Theatre becomes an attempt at group therapy, a performance through which the characters try to rebuild their community. The ghosts are not merely those summoned onstage: they are past relationships, roles never abandoned, guilt and expectations that continue to operate in the present. The past does not disappear simply because it has been declared over. It remains in behaviours, dependencies and the ways in which everyone continues to occupy a place in the lives of others. 

Staging Ibsen thus means attempting to see the family as a performance that repeats itself, in which everyone plays a part even when they believe they have escaped it. The idea is interesting precisely because theatre can make visible what remains confused in everyday life: the difference between staying together and being unable to separate, between building a community and perpetuating a dependency. Yet here, too, the film tends to accumulate, as though the complexity of relationships necessarily required a proliferation of situations. 

Irony finds an effective moment in the young boy’s remark that he has chosen to be gay. When the adults suggest that he wait until puberty, he replies that he has read that one can choose earlier, too. The exchange lightly overturns the adults’ presumption that they can determine when a person is capable of knowing themselves. Normality, with its obsession with classification and regulation, ends up looking like a bureaucracy of existence: even identity seems to have to wait for the right moment to be recognised. 

These are elements that make the film potentially very interesting. The cast is strong, the story is original, and the interplay between theatre, family, madness and social control offers rich narrative material. Zanasi has at his disposal a comedy capable of questioning conventions without merely turning them upside down. 

The problem is that È andata così can no longer work out when to stop. 

For the absurd to be effective, it needs form. Paradox is not an unlimited licence to accumulate paradoxes; madness does not become more meaningful simply because each situation produces another, even more outrageous one. When everything is eccentric, nothing stands out any longer. When every character, every relationship and every episode demands maximum intensity, intensity turns into noise. 

This is where the film becomes baroque, overloaded and redundant. Situations are repeated, insights reiterated, elements multiplied until they lose some of their force. It is not the excess of the absurd that is disturbing, but the excess of everything: as though Zanasi, having such fertile narrative material at his disposal, had feared that one well-developed idea would not be enough and had decided to add more, and more again, until he saturated the space that should have been left to the viewer. 

The result is contradictory. On the one hand, the film is compelling because of the richness of its premises and the questions it raises; on the other, it is frustrating precisely because it cannot control that richness. The film wants to portray a family that escapes definitions, but ends up becoming a prisoner itself of an accumulation from which it cannot break free. Confusing complexity with quantity is an aesthetic error before it is a narrative one: the former requires selection, while the latter can settle for abundance. 

And here we return to the family. For a relationship to survive, it also needs limits, distance, silence and the possibility of separation. Not everything that can be held together necessarily should be. Cohesion is not the same as harmony, just as continuity is not the same as health. Sometimes what holds a family together is precisely what prevents it from functioning; at other times, what appears from the outside to be dysfunction constitutes the only possible equilibrium for those who belong to it. There is no universal formula, but there is a responsibility: to distinguish freedom from dependency, affection from possession, individuality from destruction. 

This is why a film’s form is not a shell separate from its content. It is the way its content thinks. If a story deals with excess, contradiction and madness, it is not enough merely to represent them: it must find a measure capable of making them intelligible without neutralising them. Otherwise, chaos is not examined but simply reproduced. 

Unlike È andata così, which piles up situations and paradoxes until it loses its sense of proportion, Hambalek’s What Marielle Knows transforms family dysfunction into an extraordinary narrative device: with an idea that is as simple as it is unsettling, it exposes the hypocrisies and contradictions of domestic normality without diluting the force of its gaze. 

Zanasi had at his disposal material that could have sustained a dark comedy about the impossibility of defining normality, a reflection on the ambiguity of the family, and a grotesque portrait of a society that tolerates diversity only until it is forced to assess it. But the film ends up confusing freedom with accumulation and density with saturation. It remains suspended between what it could have been and what it actually manages to become. 

It could have gone brilliantly. Instead, that’s how it went.