In their second cinematic collaboration, actress-turned director Anna Foglietta directs her colleague and friend Alba Rohrwacher in a delicate portrait of a marriage tested by inevitable change. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section, A Common Story intertwines relationship drama and character study into an everyday tale about the challenges of long-time love aand the trappings of emotional routine. On site at the Lido’s Palazzo del Cinema, Foglietta and Rohrwacher meet with Lidanoir to talk about the plot’s personal inspiration, its middle-class setting and the importance of female-centred stories in the festival scene.
Lida Bach: Anna, let’s start with you. Did you know Alba before working together for A Common Story, and did you know that you wanted to direct your first film with her in it?
Anna Foglietta: Alba is a great actress. For me, she is a true star. She has a magnetic aura. Every time I watch a film with her, and also when I look at her in everyday life, I feel something touching me in a personal way.
When I wrote this story, I didn’t know l, yet, who could play the male character. I create characters, but I wasn’t particular about their physical appearance. Have you ever seen the paintings of Edvard Munch? I was thinking of Erika as a figure from one of these paintings. When I finally shared the screenplay with Alba, she called me just maybe two hours later and told me, “I don’t want to make this film - I have to make this film!”
Alba Rohrwacher: Because I really understood the meaning of the topic, and I strongly connected with the character of Erika.
AF: And this was so exciting and emotional for me. Thank you, Alba, for this.
LB: Alba, what fascinated you about this part of the wife and mother who then suddenly is alone with her husband that you felt you had you had to play her?
AR: At first, it was a struggle with the script. I have known Anna for a long time. We met about 20 years ago, then we became friends, and later did a movie together as actresses. Then she suddenly proposed this film to me and said, “Please read my script.” My heart was very open because she’s a friend and an artist whom I admire a lot. But as I started to read the script, I struggled with it intensely.
At the beginning, I felt the film was speaking about someone else—someone very far from me, very different from everything: my personal situation, family relations, education … just about everything. Then, slowly, I started to recognize something of myself there, that I didn’t want to see at first. So it was something of a fight with the script.
After reading it to the end, I realized that Anna had the ability to talk about a very powerful and specific reality and turn it into something universal: the relationship between a woman and a man, our lives, which can become a claustrophobic ritual, as well as families and life itself.
I called her immediately and said, “I don’t know why, but I feel I have to do this movie.”
LB: Anna, what inspired you to write this script? Are these also situations that you witnessed or experienced?
AF: Experienced, first of all. I am a mother of three, and so I have known many parents and relatives whose lives I observed in an almost obsessive way.
I find something pathological in these kinds of families, first of all in the relationship with their children. We give our children too much substantially. We give them a power and a centrality in our lives that is too much for them to grow up free.
When you give your children this kind of essentialist role, I’m not sure if it would still be possible for them in the future to be independent. They could be afraid of freedom.
It’s not just an Italian question or issue; it is universal. Human beings are so scared of life that they close themselves off from the people they love in order to keep these relationships from becoming too demanding.
So I started to create this script thinking about how many things we have in our lives, while we actually need just one thing: to look inside our core, our pure core. To recognize this core, we have to rid ourselves of everything and look at ourselves in a mirror, recognize our soul, recognize our life, and really scrutinize ourselves.
But this scrutiny must be real. The truth that comes when we can ask certain questions is the most important thing that human beings have to do now: to enter into a true relationship with ourselves and also with each other.
LB: Did you have some real-life references while preparing this story, about a couple whose life suddenly falls apart when they are confronted with each other in a way they haven’t been since perhaps 20 years?
AF: Yes, I had some references. We went around looking for actual women. We went to some supermarkets just to observe people, to compare the people around us and find inspiration. But yes, I also had someone specific in mind who inspired me.
LB: This is also a story particularly relating to middle-class milieu. How do you relate to that milieu, and what significance did it have for each of you to place the story there?
AF: It is very important, because I think that if you placed that same story in an upper-class family, you would have a lot of outer factors supporting the people in this situation. Some of these you can recognize in books or they might have therapists help them solve their problems.
Instead, I wanted to put two simple people at the center of my story who don’t have any of this support to help them solve their lives. It is more exciting to create a story that can speak to everyone, really everyone, because they are emotionally illiterate: unable to articulate themselves in terms of their feelings.
Because nobody taught them how to use their emotions to improve their lives, or how important it is to manage their lives through them.
Aa lot of films—for example, if I may mention Bergman’s movies—use psychoanalytical elements to explain their characters. Here, I wanted to create two characters who are unable to use these kinds of ideas or concepts.
AR: For Erika, it is a kind of revolution to say something like, “I can’t be happy. I don’t know how to be happy.” For us, this could be something simpler to say, to recognize, and also to deal with. For her, it is a revolutionary question: to be able to face this kind of emptiness.
AF: She and her husband have a pragmatic approach to their lives. When you speak to therapists, you can be lost in your thoughts, but you may not have the practice of life. They, however, have a lot of practical experience, but they haven’t learned how to manage their thoughts.
So it is interesting to look at two people who are so capable of using their lives in a practical way, but are not able to understand or articulate what is happening inside them.
LB: Alba, what does the central narrative element of change mean for you?
AR: It’s like a revolution for her. She is going to change. We don’t know how, and we don’t know where she will be in one year. It doesn’t matter. But she is able to say something that was impossible to say before, to face it.
She is able to say, “What a shitty year we had.” So this is the point of a new start: awareness. At the end, she is someone who is aware of herself.
LB: How does it feel for you to be here now at the Venice Film Festival?
AR: It’s very beautiful. We are very happy.
AF: It’s an honor.
AR: To be here together.
AF: It’s a family film. Also, our producers are women, so it’s a strong female project.
LB: But this is a year, especially in the main competition, women are so underrepresented. How do you feel about that?
AF: It’s not just an issue with the Venice Film Festival. It’s a universal problem in the world, a cultural problem and a systemic problem.
To solve it, you must start on an early level by giving women the possibility to realize their future exactly as men do.
LB: Do you have another upcoming project that you’d like to mention?
AR: Right here at Venice, the Stéphane Brizé film A Good Little Soldier. I have Anna’s film and Stéphane’s film.
LB: Yes, I’ll have it on my agenda!
LB: Thank you both for the interview!