«So my family saga is tinged with crime»- Corriere.it

In September he will be on the set of the new film, his thirteenth in 25 years. But for now Gabriele Muccino only cares about the new season of the successful series Everyone at home is fine, arriving on Sky from 5 May (and streaming on Now). We find impetuous passions and fury of the gods Restuccia, the mother Alba (Laura Morante), the children Carlo (Francesco Scianna), Sara (Silvia D’Amico) and Paolo (Simone Liberati), the partners and exes. And i Marians: Maria (sister of the head of the family Pietro who left him a share of the family restaurant) with her children Sandro (Valeria Aprea) and Riccardo (Alessio Moneta with his partner Luana, Emma Marrone). Secrets and lies, more cries and whispers in eight episodes in which human relationships, explains the director who wrote it with Muccino with Barbara Petronio, Camilla Buizza, Gabriele Galli and Andrea Nobile, “crime infiltrates”. At the base, the family saga frescoed in the 2018 film of the same name, already an example of collective analysis and self-analysis which, he assures, goes deeper on TV. «Seriality allows us to better tell the complexity of the human soul, its darkest side up to a point of no return. The twists and turns of the psyche, sometimes so dull and short-sighted, what makes humans so flawed. It’s a completely different playground than cinema, now I have an hour to tell each character. Time is the real luxury of seriality». Which allowed him to push the limits, he says. «I’ve always tried to tell how difficult it was to be in the world, but as a director I hadn’t had the courage to enter the dark area of ​​the human being where, to save you, you even end up killing another person. It is an impulse that marks the history of humanity. There was in me the desire to enter the abyss and here I felt I had the full freedom and the courage to do so. I don’t have the angst of taking people to the cinema like when you make a movie. Having removed the box office anxiety and the fear of not bringing people to the theater, I got rid of the part of me that in exploring the human soul stops before saying even unpleasant and provocative things from a moral point of view».

Muccino has made his own the warning of Tolstoy («All happy families look alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way») Muccino: he built his filmography on the investigation into domestic unhappiness. «The family is a microcosm that reflects all the dynamics, better and worse, of society. In all my filmography I have always dealt with the different declinations of families for better or for worse». But he warns: «I am not a sociologist nor a psychoanalyst. I’m an ordinary person: I’ve read books, seen movies, lived many lives, real ones and those mirroring myself in beloved characters in the cinema. I feel like I’ve been through twenty, not one. He made me think that there are no happy families ». To his children, he says, he gives some advice. «Two or three coordinates to live better. Two or three things to save your life. For example, if my father had told me to avoid following women who had problems with their father it would have been better », he jokes but not too much.

Returning to the general, he stresses that he doesn’t even feel like a witness. «I have always told what I heard, never had the ambition to tell my time. But I’m not waterproof. if in thelast kiss, filmed before 9/11, I told boys who were devourers of life, who aimed to escape, in remember me there was already a family in which the desire to appear is more important than to be.
Now is the era of social networks: we are always isolated even if we communicate with anyone. And there are no revolutionary dreams, indeed there is a retreat on rights, a strong historical revisionism and the use of social media has created a worrying dysfunction in adolescents”. Not a witness, therefore, but a narrator. Of characters at the mercy of events. “I didn’t want to dust dusty dolls. I wanted to talk about anti-heroes like there have been so many in our cinema, just think of Alberto Sordi. The characters who, as such, must have the awareness of being defeated. The awareness of our miseries is in fact the necessary condition for the anti-hero not to be a pusher. Think of Alberto Sordi». From third season it’s too early to talk. But with Muccino the ending is open. “Let’s say it’s plausible. The exploration of the human soul is endless. It’s too intriguing.”