Five Seconds

Adriano Sereni is an introverted, rough-edged man, confined to a kind of voluntary exile within the worn walls of Villa Guelfi, a noble residence reduced to an echo of the past. His existence drifts by slowly and uniformly, between the ritual of a cigar and the weariness of days that leave no trace. The arrival of a group of young people—students and recent graduates who decide to restore the surrounding countryside to its lost vitality—cracks the defensive silence Adriano had built around himself. Annoyed by that noisy enthusiasm, he initially tries to push them away, but the presence of Matilde, the granddaughter of the estate’s former owner, forces him to confront a past he would have liked to bury. Matilde, raised among those vineyards, looks at the man with a curiosity free of fear: she senses in him an ancient fragility, an unresolved pain. As the seasons pass, the clash between the man’s disillusionment and the youngsters’ vitality turns into a form of coexistence that is uncertain yet necessary, where distrust gives way to a tenuous bond made of minimal gestures and mutual survival.

A dramedy balanced on the edge of the instant that changes everything. At the center of the story is an apparently serene family whose daily life is upended by a sudden episode—five exact seconds that are enough to shatter a balance built over the years. From that moment, the film follows the characters as they try to piece the fragments back together, amid generational tensions, unspoken desires, and the search for a new possible form of affection. Within this frame, Virzì alternates melancholy tones with flashes of irony, turning a minimal event into a broader reflection on time, responsibility, and the impossibility of stopping what changes.

On the thematic level, 5 Seconds presents itself as a “hippie” fairy tale, with anti-patriarchal veins that try to call the traditional family into question. Virzì shows a propensity to emancipate certain female roles and dismantle male stereotypes, approaching the portrait of conventional families with a critical slant. However, not all of this machinery works: in some respects the film ends up adopting a vaguely misogynistic gaze toward bourgeois female culture. Some women are depicted as living stereotypes of social rituals, aesthetic illusions, and invisible pressures, rather than as deep subjects truly able to free themselves from those patterns. This crafting of sharp contrasts—rich in prompts, to be sure—remains largely superficial, entrusted more to suggestion than to radical deconstruction.

From an acting standpoint, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, as always, delivers a noteworthy performance: credible, complex, just the right amount of wild, able to balance protectiveness and fragility with delicacy. She holds the film’s emotional reins. Alongside her, Galatea Bellugi—by now established as an indispensable presence on screen—surprises and persuades, showing both innocence and an inner tension that gives her depth, and the screenplay grants her the space she needs to truly explore herself.

As for form, 5 Seconds is a pleasant film: it alternates dramatic moments with amusing sequences, and there are some genuine emotional sparks that draw the viewer in. Yet the story’s enjoyability is often superficial: too many scenes feel engineered for easy appeal, for consolatory banalities, for a television pace. It lacks that subtle tension that characterizes Virzì’s best work, that unspoken undercurrent that pushes you to think more deeply. The style, though elegant, remains too compliant with audience expectations: the right color, the snappy line, the tidy twist, the semi-official moral.

A film that moves between good intentions and an excess of authorial caution. It’s pleasant to watch, buoyed by solid performances and a few flashes of emotional truth, but it never manages to free itself from a cinematic language that is now too familiar, too conciliatory. It’s as if Virzì had chosen not to break his own equilibrium, offering a story that strokes contradictions instead of truly passing through them.