Synopsis:

“A Time of Indifference” is a scathing portrait of moral corruption in a middle-class Italian family during the early 30s. After the death of her husband, Maria Grazia inherits a sizeable estate, enough to support her and her two children, Carla and Michele, quite comfortably for the rest of their lives.
But the continuous thefts of Maria Grazia’s lover, Leo, are slowly eating into the capital and endangering the family’s economic security. Carla and Michele make feeble attempts to take charge of the situation, to open their mother’s eyes to what is going on. But an oppressive aura of resignation and leaden inertia poisons the family and stifles their will to react. When Leo falls into a casual love affair with Lisa, one of Maria Grazia’s closest friends, Carla and Michele anxiously anticipate a liberating gesture of rebellion from their mother, but not even this infidelity is sufficient to jolt Maria Grazia out of her comfortable apathy or to restore a sense of unity to the disintegrating family. Carla, too, succumbs to Leo’s seductive advances and becomes his lover. Galvanized into action, Michele makes a final, desperate attempt to salvage his family’s future and honour: he tries to murder Leo – the personification of his family's malady – but it’s a clumsy and awkward gesture, doomed to failure from the start. Nothing has changed – nothing will ever change – and Michele sinks back into resignation, inwardly rebelling against the abhorrent degeneration of his family, yet lucidly aware that he no longer has the energy or even the desire to continue the battle.