Nico Sersale’s Vicini Vicini, Stretti Stretti is a tender and quietly chaotic portrait of a couple trying to build a future while the past insists on tagging along. Set against the fading splendour of a Venetian palazzo, the film follows Gianni and Lucie, two thirty‑somethings who arrive in Venice with a single purpose. They want romance, space and the chance to finally start a family. What they get instead is Beatrice, Gianni’s mother, who crashes their trip in the middle of her own heartbreak and identity crisis.
The premise is simple but sharply observed. Sersale uses the intrusion of a parent to explore the generational tension around fertility, expectation and the pressure to perform adulthood on a schedule that no longer fits modern life. Gianni is a film editor stuck in precarious work. Lucie is a translator still searching for her voice. Their uncertainty is real and recognisable. Beatrice’s certainty is overwhelming. The collision is both funny and painful.
The film’s strongest moments come from the way it treats intimacy as something fragile and easily disrupted. Beatrice’s presence turns their getaway into a fertility boot camp. Meals are monitored. Bedsheets are changed with military precision. Her enthusiasm is suffocating but never villainous. When Gianni lies about Lucie being pregnant, the temporary glow that follows is heartbreaking because it reveals how badly all three characters want something stable to hold onto.
Jessica Cressy brings a quiet, internal tension to Lucie, a woman who feels the weight of expectation pressing in from every direction. Claudio Colica plays Gianni with a mix of charm and arrested development. Betti Pedrazzi is the film’s emotional engine, capturing a mother who is intrusive, vulnerable and terrified of being left behind. Their dynamic feels lived‑in, shaped by years of unspoken habits and inherited roles.
Sersale’s direction blends humour with emotional urgency. Venice becomes a metaphor for beauty under strain, a place where tradition and decay coexist. The film asks whether family is something we inherit or something we choose, and whether breaking free from expectation is an act of selfishness or survival.
Vicini Vicini, Stretti Stretti is a warm, perceptive story about love, pressure and the courage it takes to imagine a smaller life that still feels full.
