Director Ettore Scola's autumnal work starts out as the story of “just” one man, one family, and one apartment, but within it lies the history and culture of the Italian nation. Spanning from the birth of our hero in 1906 to his eightieth birthday (by which time he's played by Vittorio Gassman), The Family offers a crash course in twentieth-century European history, moving from World Wars I and II to postwar recovery and modern (in)security. But Scola avoids the usual sprawl of historical epics by training his lens on just one setting: the family's Rome apartment. History may come and go, but in Italy, family remains. “Room has also been left for the spectator's life; and all sensational scenes cleared out,” Scola wrote, “because my ambition was to give the audience the idea that they had to tell their own story to themselves. There is room for everybody's memories; we only indicate the rhythm of life.”