Come Undone: A Love That Refused to Stay Buried
Initially, the promotional material for Silvio Soldini’s Come Undone (Cosa voglio di più, 2010) reduced the film to the tale of a married woman falling prey to the woes of forbidden love, grappling with the burdens of a stable life, and the fleeting temptations of desire. For the Italian director, however, such a treatment to the film would offer an incomplete articulation. Come Undone is a still a film about the desire for more but of a still more emotionally intricate variety. It is about the ache of identity, the weight of loneliness, the shadow of passion, the guilt of adultery, and other understated defiant acts of adult life.
In recent years, the film has achieved a sort of renewed cult status. It’s ambiguous ending has prompted fans towards speculating and theorizing what the film’s conclusion ‘really’ is. Meaning has been attributed to gestures, silences, and passionless gazes. Even the film’s actors, Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino, have joined the discourse by suggesting that the narrative depicted in the film may exist more complexly than is readily apparent.
When Love Cracks the Routine
The narrative focuses on Anna (Alba Rohrwacher), a woman experiencing the calm stability of life, partnered in a quiet safe zone in Milan with Alessio (Giuseppe Battiston) for years. She possesses an unexciting but steady employment, a well-to-do flat, and for most people, life is the predictability most would take. But in restlessness, in quiet dissatisfaction, she moves and works in the whirling, unpredictable buildings of Milan, something is waiting to be expressed.
During a routine company training she for an unexciting job and meets Domenico (Pierfrancesco Favino), a married with kids, a run of the mill cafe manager. Its a meeting of unseemly, impusive, and plenty inconvenient connections with Anna. But from the unexciting beginnings, the unexciting dalliance quickly eats both in the unexciting everyday cafe.
There is nothing romantic in the narrative, in outline and with the expression of mood, and in the with touch of darkness in the very love it titled. There is desperate and consuming and unattainable, and in the desperate and consuming and unattainable, guilt is and with longing is. In darkness, the star crossed lovers reach an everyday.
Silvio Soldini, and in the with and the blues of, in the with stillness in the touch of the between, and in the with and the blues of, darkness of the heart with the narrative.
The Controversial Conclusion
The last segment of Come Undone was the most open to interpretation. Abruptly, the passion that has fueled the lovers starts to wane. There is no tidy resolution to the film — instead, we witness the passion that Anna begins to fade as she retreats ever so quietly from Domenico’s world. Perhaps, the movie is an illustration of the fact that no matter how consuming, passion can’t survive the ever-present mundane weight of reality.
The debate on whether Anna leaves Domenico for good has persisted for years. When she is silent in the last scenes, some argue that she is not settling into acceptance, but into the numbness that comes with resignation. Others, however, see her withdrawal as a form of empowerment disgracing self after years of drowning in emotion.
Years later, an alternate draft of the script containing entirely new details of the ending — Anna and Domenico escape together to southern Italy, where, under the realities of life, they realize their passion has waned — was soldini, in an interview, “didn’t want to punish or reward them… like most of us.”
Most Fans Overanalyze the Text
Anna and Domenico are not two souls, but reflective figures of one fractured self, is one of the most time-tested theories. Many viewers in forums and cinephile blogs have discussed the symmetrical construction of the scenes, where Anna after making love, looks at herself in the mirror and Domenico, after coming home to his wife, does the same. Both are trapped in parallel prisons of guilt, and emotionally facing a psychological frame of a dungeon.
Another theory about the film’s title, Come Undone, has less to do with romance and more to do with the unraveling of a fractured identity. In this reading, Anna’s affair is not about love, but an attempt to escape a life that is suffocating her.
Italian analysts have also noted subtle visual indicators that corroborate this hypothesis. The most striking changes in color and lighting happen while the affair deepens. The home’s cold blues and greys shift to warmer colors during the romantic encounters and ultimately return to pale light at the end. “The film breathes when Anna does and suffocates when she returns to the life,” one critic observed.
Alba Rohrwacher and the Art of Vulnerability
Alba Rohrwacher’s portrayal of Anna is the emotional core of the film— raw, confused, and heartbreakingly human. Rohrwacher, recognized for her sensitivity and restraint in performances, described working with Anna as “not as an adulteress, but as a woman listening to herself for the first time.”
During the press interviews, she revealed that shooting certain scenes had a particularly draining emotional effect. “The film isn’t erotic,” she stressed, “it’s existential. Every touch is a question, every silence is guilt.” Rohrwacher also suggested that she never really decided what Anna does at the end, implying that ambiguity is what helped maintain authenticity throughout her performance.
The film changed Rohrwacher’s career trajectory. She began to gain international attention after Come Undone and began to win major European film awards. However, she still states that Anna is one of the most challenging roles to her — not for the affair, rather the “invisible sadness” that needed to be endured.
Pierfrancesco Favino’s Quiet Storm
Pierfrancesco Favino’s Domenico is contradictory as a character. He is torn between obligation and impulse, remorse and appetite. Most likely due to Silvio’s direction, Favino’s interpretation of the character is unique. Rather than the typical cinematic “lover” archetype, he presents his character as shy, awkward, and overly tentative; almost to the point of clumsiness and negligence.
After there was time for us to discuss and understand the direction of the film, he said, “We only read the scenes once, then filmed them as they happened.” The spontaneity and the unpredictability of their scenes created unique chemistry that is opposite to what most expect. Rather than fiery passion, there was fumbling and a nervous connection.
This role improved Favino’s reputation in European cinema, but for a time it typecast him as emotionally troubled. He would later joke that “every director wanted me to cheat on someone after that movie.”
The Making of Real Intimacy
Come Undone’s six-week production was relatively inexpensive. Soldini took to real locations instead of studio sets, using confined Milan apartments and real office buildings. His strategy paid off, and yet challenges emerged from the need to film in the “real” settings. During one scene, a neighbor, assuming a real meeting was in progress, walked in uninvited. Soldini kept the take – it was the kind of “real” he wanted.
The intensity of the sex scenes was a matter of controversy in more polite circles. The framework was intentionally loose and the actors free to move, shooting from a distance and soft focus to, in his words, “preserve emotional honesty.” For Soldini, “it wasn’t about showing bodies;” it was about showing the “consequences.”
The film’s emotional impact is derived, in part, from the score. Giovanni Venosta’s haunting pieces include ambient motifs that follow a breath pattern: calm, quickened, gasping. Breath of life in a key scene and score was layered by sound designer Paolo Benvenuti. He recorded it during filming, a true testament to the integration of sound and image.
The Echo That Never Fades
Even years after airing, Come Undone continues to attract new audiences, many of whom find themselves captivated and a little disturbed by its proximity. Online forums are still rife with questions about whether Anna’s story represents liberation or possible collapse. A few commenters on the other hand, really seem to believe the whole affair unveils a fantasy, and is a more straightforward projection of everything Anna wishes to do, and everything she is too afraid to.
When presented with the opportunity to respond to the question of story interpretation in 2020, Rohrwacher responded with a gentle smile and the following quote. “Maybe it all happened in her mind. Or maybe that’s what we tell ourselves when we don’t want to admit how fragile we are.”
That perhaps is the greatest power of Come Undone. It offers no answers. It allows its characters, and its audience for that matter, to linger in the space between desire and absence. It is a film that does not tell a story, but whispers a truth: love is, and always will be, a heartbeat away.