Those Happy Years

Those Happy Years (Anni felici, 2013) is an Italian tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM. Rome, 1974: Guido (Kim Rossi Stuart) is a painter who treats his family as background noise to his ambitions. His wife Serena (Micaela Ramazzotti) absorbs it all — until she doesn't, and a stranger (Martina Gedeck) accelerates what was already coming.

Director Daniele Luchetti drew on his own childhood for the material. The camera stays close to the couple's ten-year-old son Dario, who watches the marriage come apart in slow motion without the vocabulary to name what he's seeing. The title is sardonic — the adults in this story don't get to look back on these years fondly.

What Luchetti gets right is how children experience adult disaster: not all at once, but in small accumulating moments. Stream Those Happy Years online on iFILM.