Daniele Luchetti has made some fine films, bit this one is a dispiritingly sour piece. When we first meet them, in the early 1980s, Aldo and Vanda, are a young couple living in Naples with two young children. Aldo pontificates about literature for RAI, and has fallen for Lidia, a young beauty who works there. There's a scene that involves tying shoelaces, but the ties the title really refers to are those that bind someone to their spouse/partner and the children they share. Lidia recognises that Aldo still feels their pull and sends him back to his wife and children.

We then fast forward to find Aldo and Vanda are in their sixties, and in the roles Alba Rohrwacher and Luigi Lo Cascio have been replaced by Laura Morante, still sensational, and Silvio Orlando, a Luchetti favourite. (There's the usual problem of finding it impossible to believe the younger versions would have evolved into the older ones.) It soon emerges that staying together hasn't turned out well, and their marriage has been unhappy for both of them. We're also meant to believe that it's been so toxic that their children, so delightful when young, have turned in middle age into a repellent pair, who treat their parents appallingly.

The action and direction are as excellent as one would expect, but the screenplay (written by Luchetti and two others, one the author of the original novel) is a turn-off. Its moral seems to be that a man should go wherever his lust takes him, and let his wife and children go hang. Maybe keep doing this until he can no longer attract young replacements, or the alimony payments get too much. Not attractive.

I don't understand how the rating of the film can be so low (when I'm writing this review the rating is only 5.3),so I decided to write my first review just to give it a little shout-out.

The plot actually seems already heard: the two protagonists Aldo (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Wanda (Alba Rohrwacher) are a middle-class couple from the 1980s with two children. The family routine will be upset due to Aldo's infatuation with Lydia (Linda Caridi),who will induce the man to leave his family to go and live with her in Rome.

Lacci has a cast of excellent performers, and, far from being a perfect film, it move us and it invites us to reflect on the masochism of which some people are victims, in relationships but also towards life itself. Give it a chance!

This movie definitely does not deserve the low 5-ish rating I see now on IMDB. It is a compelling emotional story, told and shot very well, where the whole cast is very good. Most of the story is told by the close-ups on their faces, and this worked very well for me.

The movie, without giving away too much, it's the story of the separation - and, in a broader sense, of the life of a family. We make choices, in life. Good or bad, the movie states that consequences, always, apply: and as long as these consequences involve other people, they hardly can be what we intended or anticipated, because things become important for us without previous advice (I really appreciated how two characters keep on meeting in a place they do not particularly like, and when they ask themselves why, they do not really have a reply). The basic rule to avoid the pain should be to be true to ourselves and to our loved ones, but this rule is frequently ignored, and when this happens, results come along accordingly.

I really appreciated the slow pace, the surprising ending, and the perfect setting (it's not easy to make a movie set in the 80's! It's basically an historical movie, with the exception that most of the audience may have some personal memory of that time, so you have to be very careful to make them believe it). I would suggest this movie especially to young couples: it's a map of the dangers and risks of adulthood and marriage, some kind of tourist guide for places of the soul you do not want to visit.