Things We Don't Say

Carlo and Elisa have been married for twenty years. He is a philosophy professor and a writer who can no longer write; she is a sharp, successful journalist. Their life in Rome looks enviable from the outside, but the marriage has gone quiet, and Carlo is hiding something. To find some spark again, they travel to Tangier with their oldest friends, Paolo and Anna, whose own marriage is fraying, and the couple's thirteen-year-old daughter Vittoria, a bright, odd, watchful girl who attaches herself to Carlo. The holiday is meant to bring everyone closer. It does the opposite.

Gabriele Muccino, back in Italy after his Hollywood years, returns to the territory he knows best: couples, friendships, and the lies that hold them together, as in The Last Kiss. This time the source is American, Delia Ephron's novel Siracusa, moved from Sicily to Morocco. The white light of Tangier, the hotel terraces and the narrow streets make the perfect pressure cooker. Stefano Accorsi, Miriam Leone, Claudio Santamaria and Carolina Crescentini are four of Italy's best, and they play off each other with real bite, at the dinners full of things half said and the fights in hotel rooms afterwards.

Muccino has always been a director of raised voices, and there is some of that here. But the film is more controlled than his usual work and more interested in silence: what each person knows and chooses not to say, and what a child sees that the adults miss. The final stretch hits hard. A grown-up, unsettling drama about the cost of comfortable lies, and one of Muccino's best in years.