2023-10-19 07:41:55
by Paolo Mereghetti
«There’s Still Tomorrow», the actress’s directorial debut, is a surprising film. Born from the desire to tell the stories of women who lived in the immediate post-war period “and built the country”
Let’s say it right away: Paola Cortellesi’s directorial debut is decidedly remarkable. «There’s Still Tomorrow», which opened the Rome Film Festival yesterday in competition, is a surprising film: for the choice of subject, first of all (the daily life of a commoner in Rome in 1946), for the originality of the tone, capable of moving from drama to farce and vice versa without any jarring, but above all for the directorial choices that try to find an unforeseen balance between a realistic key and a more exemplary and didactic one.
Of course, there are some naiveties, some solutions clash but they are in some way a consequence of the ambition and originality put into play. Continuing her work as a screenwriter, the choice of directing «came naturally, as a kind of inevitable growth» explains Paola Cortellesi, born from «the desire to tell the stories of women who lived in the immediate post-war period, those who did not are never remembered, especially poor Cinderellas that no one takes it upon themselves to celebrate even though they built the social fabric of our country, as – I would like to underline – my great-grandmother and my grandmother were.”
There, from those memories and those stories, the character of Delia (played by Cortellesi herself) was born, whose husband wishes her a good day with a slap and who does not stop taking care of her children, the house, her father-in-law for the whole day, dividing herself among a thousand jobs and odd jobs to also contribute to the family budget, «a woman like many others – she continues -, of those who accepted a life of abuse without ever asking questions, because that was how it had to be, convinced that they could have no other future than that of lowering your head and accepting everything in silence.”
Even when it involved violence and mistreatment. A tear-jerking melodrama could have been born from it, but the director’s screenplay with Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda instead chooses a more unusual approach, where the tones mix: we smile at the small squabbles in the courtyard, at the foul-mouthed liveliness of the two youngest children, even for the obtuse selfishness of his father-in-law (Giorgio Colangeli); we side with the shy mechanic Nino (Vinicio Marchionni) who could perhaps help Delia change her life or with Marisa (Emanuela Fanelli), a fruit farmer who has received an enviable husband; or she trembles at the tough insensitivity of her husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea), capable only of reasoning with violence and oppression. Which, however, the film never shows in its raw realism.
«We already see too much violence and I didn’t want to fall into voyeurism» explains Cortellesi, and for this reason the hardest moments are as if transfigured into a kind of edgy ballet where the songs of yesterday and today («Nessuno» sung by Musica Nuda, «Forgive us» in the voice of Achille Togliani) comment in antiphrasis on what we see (like at the beginning «Open the windows»), in a sort of two-person game where the dance ends up putting a little distance from the violence but also reiterate its rituality and custom. While in other scenes the songs of Dalla, Silvestri or Concato take the place of the thoughts that Delia does not have the courage to express.
To change a destiny that seems written in stone and that Davide Leoni’s black and white holds halfway between the memories of a cinematic past and a present of painful humiliations, will come the hope of marriage for his daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano) and a mysterious letter on whose contents the viewer will exercise their fantasies but whose authentic meaning will only be revealed in the very last scenes. Not so much to give a possible twist to the film but to broaden the discussion of Delia and the other women towards a dimension that is no longer just individual but finally collective and social.
October 18, 2023 (modified October 18, 2023 | 8:56 pm)
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