Francesco Costabile’s Staid Family Melodrama

The title of Luigi Celeste’s memoir, “Non sarà sempre così”— which serves as the source material for Francesco Costabile’s more bluntly-titled Italian melodrama, “Familia” — translates to: “It won’t always be like this.” It’s an elegiac promise that has the whiff of a wistful warning. And considering what we learn about Celeste’s family in book and film alike, it’s a rather apt précis for the seemingly inescapable threat that looms over this young man’s life. Told with wounding simplicity and a candid sense of assurance (much of it due to the strength of the film’s tightly wound performances), “Familia” is a portrait of a family trying to escape the violent trappings of a father intent on reshaping it in his own image.

When we first meet the Celeste family, they look like any other unit: Franco (Francesco Di Leva) and Licia (Barbara Ronchi) live in a homey apartment together with their two young boys, Luigi (Francesco De Lucia) and Alessandro (Stefano Valentini). It’s only in between their honed and familiar gestures that you begin to see what’s simmering underneath their placid smiles: Franco is a bully of a father and a husband.

His wife has learned to navigate his temper, while his boys have begun to see him with a mix of horror and awe. Franco is the kind of father who slaps his kid for not greeting him with a kiss, and then immediately embraces him against his will. Violence and tenderness are one and the same in that household: “When there are noises, we have to wait,” the brothers know — code for staying in their room while Franco hits Licia with impunity.

But that’s only preamble to the real story behind “Familia,” which quickly shatters the unnerving picture of the Celeste family when Licia finally stands up to Franco and gets the authorities involved. Costabile pierces through the staid formalism of his compositions (with a spare use of music that insists, instead, we linger in tense silence with this family) with an explosive scene where the husband and the young boys are taken from Licia — he to jail, they to social services.

When we catch up with them all again years later, the grown-up boys and Licia have moved and made a different life for themselves away from Franco. But the scars from that incident, not to mention the damage from the time mother and sons spent apart while navigating a bureaucracy designed to keep kids safe from abusive households, lingers still in the apartment they all share. And so when Franco reappears in their lives, Luigi (Francesco Gheghi), in particular, will have to assess how much of his current life has been shaped by his father — and, most obviously, by his absence.

Costabile’s film rightly focuses on Luigi, the sensitive boy who has grown to become an angered young man whose friends are neo-Nazis intent on nurturing his aggrieved sense of entitlement. As his father resurfaces in his life, slowly worming himself into family dinners and turning Licia once more into a defensive and defenseless pliable wife eager to keep her boys safe, Luigi is constantly trying to find place for his anger, for his melancholy, for his own sense of alienation. It makes sense that bearing witness to domestic violence at home would push him to contain and destroy the gentleness that had once shielded him; he both wants and loathes wanting to be his father. 

At times, Costabile, Vittorio Moroni and Adriano Chiarelli’s adapted script plays like a character portrait of a fascist that’s all too simple and simplistic: Hurt people hurt people, yes, but also, violence begets violence. Yet Gheghi finds layers and textures within those bland platitudes, with Costabile’s camera lingering in the actor’s balled up fist of a performance enough to see the moments when it cracks open.

For instance, there’s a dinner party scene where DP Giuseppe Maio unnervingly steady camera begins in a medium shot that lets us see the entire family at the table, the tension slowly ratcheting up between father and son as we move in, ever so slowly, so we can see only the two of them in the shot, only to move closer in to offer an uncomfortable close-up of Luigi. Such steady, discomfiting formalism is felt throughout, and allows “Familia” to really settle into a naturalism that makes the heightened, violent tragedy to which it builds (the film feels almost Oedipal), all the more affecting.

Given how such a premise lends itself to overly familiar contemporary conversations around toxic masculinity and male loneliness — not to mention generational trauma — it’s quite revealing that it is Rochi’s wildly restrained take on Licia that most shines through. Di Leva (who won best supporting actor at the David di Donatello awards) and Gheghi (who won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor at Venice in 2024) may have the showier roles, but it is Rochi’s quiet dignity as a woman who cannot imagine a way out from living with the man she thought she had outrun that is most devastating. Licia is a woman seemingly trapped in a life of her own making, whose agency has been ground to dust by the sheer presence of a man she once loved and now can only fear. And Rochi captures it all with her eyes, which feel like they’re constantly roaming around for an exit out of a story she can’t believe she’s forced to endure.

Italy’s submission the Oscar international feature category is a rather modest affair, most successful when it zeroes in on its titular family unit. Less so, perhaps, when it twists itself into more of a stoic thriller whenever Luigi’s fascist friends come into the picture. Such genre-hopping makes it quite faithful, one imagines, to Celeste’s memoir; the young boy’s life felt like it could swing from maudlin melodrama to violent action film with the blink of an eye (or the punch of a fist). On screen, though, such disparate sensibilities all but cleave “Familia” in half.

Even so, the vulnerable performances Costabile elicits from their actors (which thrive in the long, studied takes that echo the filmmaker’s previous work in documentary filmmaking) are what make the film sing. And they are what make the film’s final moments (part Hitchcock, part Almodóvar) more hopeful than they deserve to be, as if the Italian filmmaker had waited until their final shot to truly capture the promise of the title of Celeste’s memoir amid a bleakness that thankfully doesn’t feel overwhelming. It won’t always be like this; perhaps it can be different, but at what cost?