Su Netflix arriva “A Family Affair”, a romantic comedy that is set to be one of the top titles of summer streaming. It is directed by Richard LaGravenese (already director of “PS I Love You”), while the protagonists are Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron. The Oscar-winning actress and the actor of “The Iron Claw”, together again after the highly erotic scenes of “The Paperboy” (2012), are engaged in the story of the unpredictable and sometimes hilarious consequences of attraction.
The film follows the adventures of Zara (Joey King), a twenty-four-year-old who works as a personal assistant for movie star Chris Cole (Efron). The man is a relentless womanizeran egocentric man full of manias and difficult to please; no longer able to support his whims and the deadly pace of work, Zara decides to quit. The unexpected meeting between her ex-boss and her mother Brooke (Kidman) and the consequent birth of a passionate relationship between them will change the cards on the table. Zara goes crazy at the thought of the bond between her mother and her “tormentor”, people between whom there is also a marked age difference. The three will find themselves facing the most complex sides of love, sex and the search for identity.
It is impossible to ignore the similarities between the plot of “A Family Affair” and “The Idea of You”, the latest Prime Video hit starring Anne Hathaway, but evidently overseas they are running out of ideas. To be honest, the basic recipe can be extended to almost all new productions: a story that is at times touching, comic inserts and highly attractive acting presences.
That doesn’t mean that “A Family Affair” isn’t a pleasant watch.
The film tells in its own way not so much the mother-daughter relationship as the complexity of feelings and bonds between people who love each other. It also traces in the acquisition of maturity and awareness the only possible way to discover who you really are.
On the one hand we have a widowed woman who, after many years of solitude, ends up reopening her arms to the careless love of daughter’s warnings and the age difference with the man in question; on the other hand, a girl torn between her own aspirations, the complex of being the daughter of a talented woman and the consequences of the sudden and unlikely passion between two people important to her.
The protagonist at the mercy of eros she is a woman in full reconstruction and whose age is only an anagraphic fact since life can destroy you and ask you to rebuild yourself at any moment. The experience of being over fifty, in any case, has given her clear ideas on some basic rules to expect observance in a relationship. A sort of useless conquest since the woman still comes out with the incorruptible phrase of avoidant attachment: “I don’t want to need him, because if it ends…”. As if to say that there is no experience or IQ that matters: somewhere they always live the fears of a wounded child, ready to emerge when the adult feels the helm of rationality is being taken away.
The film is certainly no more lenient towards the character of the daughter, characterized as a young woman who poses all the time as the custodian of modesty of customs and, at times, of the absolute truth, when she is then faced with the evidence of being an ego-referent, ready to point out the speck in other people’s eye and ignore the beam in her own.
Finally, things are no better for the male figure, an unresolved individual, whose neuroses feed on themselves ivory tower solitude where celebrity forced him.
In short, “A Family Affair” offers a beautiful one examines internal turmoil variously assorted.
The only one who remains a beacon of lively wisdom is the “life expert” played by the eternal Kathy Bates, here in the role of the editor and mother-in-law of the character played by Kidman. Partly the alter ego of the latter and partly an analyst, she represents the age in which a solid awareness of how it is not worth getting damned for other people’s opinions and servants embrace our deep motivations not only without dramatizing them but welcoming them with a Calvinian lightness.
Joey King, an actress known from the saga “The Kissing Booth”, is perhaps the most spontaneous of the film’s protagonists.
In fact, it is difficult to speak of a natural understanding between the two older performers, which significantly undermines the credibility of the whole.
We are in the classic film in which the spectator abandons himself to some internal resonance and at the same time finds disengagement seasoned with Spicy jokes and situationsno more no less.
