Come Ti Muovi, Sbagli
Comedy • 2025 • 1h 37m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
A retired professor’s calm life of comfort and companionship is upended when his daughter, facing marital issues, arrives with her two unruly children.
“Solitude offers the intellectually elevated man two advantages: the first, to be with himself; the second, not to be with others.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
What remains of happiness when one has spent most of life dodging annoyances, building a fortress of habits, taking refuge in the calm of reading, silence, and carefully chosen relationships? The seventy-year-old professor in Gianni Di Gregorio’s film seems to have reached that fragile oasis of quiet that many confuse with peace: a dignified pension, a discreet companion, a few friends, an orderly and protective home. But the world, with its brutality, always knocks at the door, and it does so through family: a daughter in crisis, two uncontrollable grandchildren, chaos breaking into where composure once reigned.
It is in this collision that the film takes shape: not as the chronicle of yet another family comedy, but as a philosophical reflection on the human condition, forced to come to terms with the most inevitable of all bonds — the family bond. The family: cage and refuge, gift and curse, intrusion and consolation. No place more than the family can both shatter the illusion of freedom and return to us the very sense of living. “I was doing so well, family screws you over” could be the bitter summary of a character who finds himself sacrificing his orderly private happiness to re-enter the collective disorder of love.
Di Gregorio builds a narrative where every gesture becomes a sign: the arrival of the grandchildren unsettles rituals, breaks the silence, destabilizes order. And yet it is precisely this rupture that opens up a new dimension: the discovery that love, even with its share of pain and renunciation, is the only experience capable of tearing us away from the sterility of self-preservation. Affection, which weighs like an unbearable burden, also reveals itself as the possibility of everyday transcendence: the heroism of caring, the sacrifice that becomes proof of existence.
The film, beneath its apparent narrative lightness, stages a confrontation between nostalgia and inevitability. Nostalgia for a quiet, self-sufficient life, shielded from the invasions of others; inevitability of ties that impose themselves as destiny. It is also a discourse on irretrievability: once the world enters our home, there is no going back; once noise has broken the silence, it cannot be erased.
The work, with its customary gentle irony, also speaks of other things: of betrayal and forgiveness, of desire and responsibility, of the importance of culture as a critical lens on life (whether it be the Lombards evoked with levity or the ghosts of history that accompany us). Culture appears as the fragile counterbalance to cling to when personal reality falters.
Come ti muovi, sbagli thus becomes a parable on the human condition: on solitude, which can be chosen but is rarely a lasting concession; on love, which deceives and wounds but continues to impose itself as a horizon of meaning; on betrayal and forgiveness, responsibility and desire. On family as a paradox of companionship and limit, root and bond.
The concept of disappointment is central: how much others can disappoint our poetry and our vision of things, and how much we can disappoint the expectations of others.
A window onto habits, the necessity of rituals, and for some, of order and silence. In this oscillation between comfort and oppression, between chaos and nostalgia, the film finds its existential breath: the confirmation that there is no life completely withdrawn from others, and that every attempt to save oneself from them is, perhaps, destined to fail.
And yet, in the subtle and painful irony of life, another core of truth emerges: often saving oneself — withdrawing from others’ plots and from obligations imposed by bonds — may prove more fruitful and authentic than being condemned to live trapped in the incessant flow of others. Chosen freedom, even when marked by isolation and silence, then becomes the only ground on which the subject can reclaim their existence, where serenity is not a concession but a fragile and conscious conquest.
“Solitude is the companionship of those who know how to be with themselves.”
— Fabrizio Caramagna
