All right at home – Series 2 is Muccino to the nth degree. And it works for that

There are directors who manage to imprint their mold from the very first frames, and Gabriele Muccino in All is well at home – The series it is one of them. The second season of his first television series, available on Sky and streaming on NOW, is the synthesis of the entire Muccini universe that we have come to know over the past decades: in fact, from the very first minutes of the first episode, there are people screaming, collapsing, who seek confrontation and who are devoured by a sense of guilt because one of the main characteristics of Muccino’s filmography has always been the conflictunderstood as a personal and inevitable guerrilla warfare of the characters against themselves. In Everyone at home is finethen, there are conflicts galore: the center of everything continues to be there Ristuccia family, divided between the increasingly meager business of the once prestigious San Pietro restaurant in the heart of Rome and a series of unspeakable secrets that leads it, in fact, to explode in all its roar. After the shocking revelation of the first season finale, with that corpse buried in the garden of the beach house that brought the matriarchs Ristuccia and Mariani, played by Laura Morante and Paola Sotgiu, to share their burden with their children, transforming the secret from private to common exactly as it had happened in the finale of Desperate HousewivesYes, the characters are given a chance to move on with their lives well aware that omission will sooner or later take their toll on them.

A year goes by, Geneva (Laura Adriani), continues to struggle against the coma after the car accident that saw her jump off a cliff, while Carlo (Francesco Scianna, crazy), Riccardo (Alessio Mancini) and Sara (Silvia D’Amico, creepy) they try in every way to keep the San Pietro afloat, soon realizing that if they don’t find a starred chef capable of restoring prestige to the name of the restaurant, things could go very badly. In the meantime, however, another threat reappears from the past, namely the shadow of the gangster who harassed Riccardo and Carlo who, once released from prison, ponders revenge by once again upsetting the very fragile balances that bind the protagonists. Protagonists who, even more than the previous episodes, scream and shake more and more loudly. Everyone has a different reason for doing it. There’s Sara who does it because she can’t stand Diego’s presence anymore, the faithless husband brilliantly played by Antonio Folletto, at his side, even if it must be said that if there is a character who has matured this season, it is him. There is Paolo struggling to regain custody of his son Giovanni (Federico Ielapi) that his mother Olivia (Eugenia Costantini) prevents him from seeing. There is Riccardo shouting for his wife Luana (Emma Brown, very good) you don’t leave it for fear of the gangster who has come back to haunt their lives – in this regard, there is a scene with a cat that recalls, alas, the fate of the rabbit in Fatal Attraction. There is Carlo who is agitated both because he fears that Ginevra, who has awakened from the coma, may remember the body hidden in the garden and both because the plan to expand into Sardinia thanks to the complicity of his ex-wife Elettra (Euridice Axen) and his partner and friend Mauritius (Marco Rossetti) is not going through the way he wanted, and there is Beatrice (Milena Mancini, exceptional) who tries to do the best she can for her husband Sandro (Valerio Aprea, even more exceptional), now devoured by Alzheimer’s.

Along with wonderful scenes such as the one in which Beatrice leaves her husband in a specialized facility, one of the most intense and poignant ever shot by Muccino, and the one in which Laura Morante’s Alba first hates and then falls in love with a little dog who doesn’t stop following her – a picture that seems to recall the relationship of the protagonist with a quadruped in Solo, film directed by Morante herself in 2016 -, All is well at home – The series it works because Muccino is a master at portraying the psychological nuances of his creatures and, above all, the relative breaking points. This second season, then, allows him to work on some characters in a more surgical and precise way – Riccardo, for example, from a rambling slacker becomes, compared to the personal disaster of his cousins, a giant – giving life to a diverse humanity which, it is true, continues to express itself through exaggerated and hyperbolic body language, but which is overflowing with truth. It’s as if Muccino put us in front of the mirror, releasing the frustrations and anger that we mere mortals we try to choke so as not to lose face: the road, at this point, seems to free ourselves, to give vent to those sides of our character that we keep hidden in order to try to be in the world more serenely.

In short, the pieces all fit together, including the various new entries of this season – starting with the charming French singer-songwriter and actor Tom Leeb as a successful chef courted by many restaurants and by Camilla Semino Favro as a successful lawyer – and the different directorial gimmicks they make Everyone at home is fine one of the most interesting products of the Italian television scene, with the hope that Muccino certainly does not stop there. The series, whose first season was awarded with the Silver Ribbon, is produced by Sky Studios and by Andrea and Raffaella Leone for Lotus Production – a Leone Film Group company – and is written by Gabriele Muccino, Barbara Petronio (head writer and creative producer), Camilla Buizza, Gabriele Galli and Andrea Nobile.

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