Writers: Anna Foglietta, Tania Pedroni and Matteo Ferri
Director: Anna Foglietta
An ordinary marriage under strain, Anna Foglietta’s directorial debut A Common Story showing in the First Features Competition is both restrained and accomplished, exploring the pressures on a couple left alone for the first time in years when their daughter goes to university. Staged across four seasonal chapters, Foglietta’s approach is filled with subtly as an affectionate and settled couple slowly find their bond coming apart. It is the balance the writer-director gives to both Erika and Mauro that illuminates this quiet picture, framed within everyday working-class Italian life.
Filling their days with work and caring for other people, Erika and Mauro still love each other but become trapped by the same domestic routine. Frustrated by a position she cannot escape, Erika becomes increasingly withdrawn, feeling the weight of duty towards others while Mauro clashes with a bullish father, unable to reach his wife. As the year unfolds, they just keep doing the same thing day after day.
Foglietta draws her characters as two separate entities with uneven positions in their marriage, albeit an imbalance that Mauro fails to recognise. Erika is the heart of A Common Story, a sensitive and small performance from Alba Rohrwacher who rarely articulates her feelings but allows her pained expressions and aloofness to speak for her character’s emotional detachment. An unspoken strand of OCD, a compulsion to clean speaks to her need for control and the audience first meet her washing up at her daughter’s new halls of residence, while her emotional distress at home emerges in a need for domestic perfection – perfectly baked goods for breakfast and a tidiness that is never the focus of the scene but explains so much about Erika’s inner whirl.
Mauro is initially more typical, devoted to his wife, always showing her love and excited to be alone with her after years of parenting. But he misses the signs, wrapped up in his own feud with his cruel elderly father who sells the family business without telling his son. Mauro’s blindness to the many roles played by his wife are slowly revealed to him, but Guido Caprino never makes him the baddie, recognising the role he also has to play in supporting his family. And as Mauro coaches the local boys football team or fixes lights for his mother-in-law, there is a level of complexity in Caprino’s performance that suggests he’s just doing his best but still getting it wrong.
Foglietta’s camera is always intimate, trained close on the faces of the two protagonists and their reactions, often not including the people they speak to clear whose point of view the audience is supposed to see. The self-realisation and its confession comes perhaps too easily from Mauro but it ends as quietly as it began, with the couple finding a way through, both faces now on screen and perhaps finding a greater harmony and a more honest relationship ahead. Well realised if not earth-shattering drama.
A Common Story is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025 from 7-18 October.
