A brief affair (first feature)

The fates of two couples – Lea and Andrea, around thirty, and Rocco and Cecilia, twenty years older – collide on the night Lea meets Rocco at a bar and starts having an affair with him in a hotel room. An ordinary case of infidelity, it would seem, but one which takes an unexpected turn when Lea insinuates herself into Rocco’s life, until their respective spouses are drawn in for a final showdown.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
I wrote the first draft of this story a long time ago. I was twenty-five then, and completely inflexible when it came to my ideas about relationships – that intransigence you only have about things you know nothing about. When I went back to that old treatment, years later, I found myself with the same questions I’d had at the start. What is a couple? How does it work; what are the boundaries; what keeps people together and what dooms them to fail? What is allowed and what is unacceptable, in a union between two individuals? But I had no cut-and-dry answers. Couples are an impenetrable entity. You can never understand a couple, even when you are part of one – says Yasmina Reza in Happy Are the Happy.