The Summer House

Before presenting the script of her new film to the financing committee, Anna learns from her husband that he will not travel with her to the French Riviera but will remain in Paris where he has begun a new relationship.

The screenplay will be criticized and Anna in the throes of a confusing crisis opens the very autobiographical tale of "The Holidaymakers," a work more tragic than comic in which the director lays bare in a seemingly flawed puzzle a sophisticated labyrinth of situations, relationships and emotions.

Luca leaves her in Paris and then again on the coast where he arrived to leave again immediately and bid her a final farewell while she continued to call him and seek contact with him. Their daughter Celia reveals to her that she does not believe in God, while her mother prays for her father's return; the little girl has been studying the Big Bang and the cosmological model seems to have convinced her, while she reveals to her mother that she has known her father's new companion with her daughters and dog since the previous winter.

In the wonderful house on the coast, Anna's mother plays the piano; the husband of Anastasia whose ashes will be scattered in the sea fails to drown because he is an excellent swimmer; the employees fail to assert their rights, and amid loves that are born and end, the family group uses the dinner table as group therapy, in which the lonelinesses of each are reflected in mutual misunderstandings.

Serious accusations are made, laughing and joking, singing and playing, crying and drinking.

Rapes, abortions, human miseries, illusions and disillusionments, death.

The debate about the difference between right and left, the latter described as the "force of despair" of those who know that nothing will change but do not stop fighting.

In the imprisonment of their own deceptions everyone plays a role, and the vacationers are left with nothing to do but swim in the pool while underneath is the beautiful sea of the azure coast.

Anna knows she repeats the same film over and over again, it is revealed to her even by the committee that refuses her funding, but she cannot stop being what she is, over the top, crazy, restless, too deep not to be superficial.

Her sister Elena accuses her of self-centeredness and does not accept that she continues to talk about her deceased brother.

A dramatic cheerfulness over which hovers the despair of an affluent but tragically deadly life; a lacerating melancholy befalls the two sisters who intone out of tune "what is life without a love... and the wind rises, a wind cold as leaves the hopes throws down..."

A noisy cheerfulness, that of the house, which becomes weeping, regret and restless disillusionment.

Life is the vacation of death and love is the vacation of life; vacationers know that the vacation ends as life ends precisely because we are mortal, as everything ends because we are finished.

"What is life ... without death ...

what is love ... without life ..

... and a wind rises, a cold wind, like leaves the hopes it throws down ..

night descends with its cold hands on me...

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's film, is a tragic and comic cry of pain, a terrible and beautiful fresco over which death hovers in all its facets, ranging from sorrow to regret, from selfishness to disillusionment, from pleasure to love that is "a dictatorship," as a song reminds us:

A lacerating film of those who do not hesitate to put themselves on the line, those who do not look away from their neuroses, those who do not give up seeing the end, death and dictatorship of love "with its cold hands" because only anarchy gives birth to emotion.