2024-04-11 03:53:58
Actress, screenwriter and now director, the Italian Paola Cortellesi (Rome, 1973) was visiting Buenos Aires accompanying his debut film, the immensely popular one in his country There will always be a tomorrowduring the two screenings that took place within the framework of the 10th Italian Film Week. Two screenings that were actually three, since the organizers of the annual meeting decided to add an extra screening after the originals sold out at the speed of light. Cortellesi’s debut, which in Italy managed to attract nearly six million viewers, thus entering the Top Ten of the highest-grossing titles in the recent history of that country, arrives this Thursday in commercial theaters in Argentina. “The truth is that after ten years of writing scripts for other people, the idea of doing it for my own film was something natural,” says the visitor in conversation with Page 12. Married to fellow filmmaker Riccardo Milani, Cortellesi has co-written and/or starred in seven feature films that had him as director, in addition to collaborating on scripts for other filmmakers such as Massimiliano Bruno and Cristina Comencini.
There will always be a tomorrow It begins with an image that encapsulates one of the central themes of the story. During a dawn like any other, Delia and her husband Ivano wake up lying in their marriage bed; The expression Good morning The woman’s response, for no apparent reason and as if it were the most normal thing in the world, is a royal slap. The year is 1946, the place is a Roman neighborhood and Delia begins a new day in which she must maintain the precarious balance between her roles as wife, mother and daughter-in-law with the eventual jobs as a seamstress in a local establishment. While a United States soldier gives her a couple of precious packages of chocolate on the street and a young love that could not be offers her some talk, the protagonist endures the constant humiliations and challenges of her husband, the usual preliminary step to the beating. Filmed in black and white, the film describes with a sense of humor the less friendly regions of the stainless patriarchy, against the background of a moment in Italian history of great political and social changes..
That of women and their place in society “is a topic that I have touched on on many occasions, both as an actress – in film, theater and television – and in the role of screenwriter,” says Paola Cortellesi at the beginning of the interview. “I have written scripts with plots that border on that of There will always be a tomorrowlinked to discrimination against women. It is a topic that unnerves me and that challenges all women. And I’m not just talking about physical violence, but also verbal violence. Even those violences that do not involve a verbal offense, but are still violence. Invisibility at work, for example, is something we all know very well.. A few years ago I wrote the script for a film that touched on the topic of salary disparity, a comedy in which the protagonist invents a subterfuge to be able to live better. The truth is that I was always interested in talking about this issue, on various levels.”
-Filming in black and white is a strong aesthetic decision. Are there other reasons beyond reflecting an era through the cinema that was produced at that time, immediately after World War II?
-More than aesthetics, I would say that it was an instinctive decision. My grandmother and great-grandmother told me stories from that era, stories they had witnessed or heard. Things that were transmitted in the patios, because the truth is that life then was very communal, there was very little privacy. I imagine that something similar also happened here in Argentina. When my nonna When he told me those things, there was an element that always caught my attention: the humorous tone, a light tone. They talked about hard things like hunger, misery, death, but always a little like that, from a distance.. I guess that’s part of human nature; perhaps there is something linked to the need to exorcise all those things. On the other hand, I have always written scripts using humor. The truth is that I imagined those memories in black and white, perhaps because that was how the cinema of those times, that of neorealism, had told me about them. Even before starting to work on the script, the decision to have it in black and white had already been made.
-Beyond this link with the neorealist period of Italian cinema, there is in There will always be a tomorrow clear influences of the Italian comedywhose greatest cultists managed to tell the darkest stories using humor.
-I grew up watching those movies, like We had loved each other so muchby Ettore Scola, which used to be shown on state television. We watched them with my dad, who was passionate about movies, especially during the summer, when they showed old movies. And black and white wasn’t something that bothered me. Nor did the fact that they were old films for me, who was a young girl. On the contrary, I liked them a lot. I grew up with the great masters of the Italian comedyas Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi, Luigi Comencini, whom I learned to love. For that reason I think those names have shaped my way of writing. A way of understanding humor and, in a certain way, cinema. I have always believed that the Italian comedy It has told things about our country much better than other types of films. The true Italian character, which is full of nuances. These comedies have described the most terrible things, but always with humor. There is a way of being of the Italian, a way of standing, that brings together these diverse tones. There is a truth in that mixture of tones that is not usually present when the film works alone, for example the dramatic or the pure and simple comedy.
-There is a movie with which There will always be a tomorrow It has several points of contact: Seduced and abandoned (1964), by Pietro Germi, in which the Sicilian customs surrounding courtships, marriages and unwanted pregnancies are described with extremely acid humor.
-Ehhhh! (the interjection is pronounced in the most Italian way imaginable). Seduced and abandoned He laughs at all those questions. Imagine that same plot, tragic, without the sense of humor. The great thing about Germi’s film is that it laughs at the things that happened at that time without leaving aside criticism.
-Taking into account your experience as an actress, what was the acting directing process like with the rest of the cast?
-The easiest part of directing was the acting. I think that has to do, in part, with the thirty years of career I have had as an actress, but also with the fact that I had an extraordinary cast: Valerio Mastandrea, Emanuela Fanelli, Giorgio Colangeli and the young actors, who are excellent. We had three weeks of rehearsals with the entire group, reading the dialogues together. During that previous stage we made some modifications and changes, but once filming was finished it was done strictly following the lines of the script. As is usually done in the theater, on the other hand. We usually write in threes –Furio Andreotti, Giulia Calenda and I–, and when the final script is approved after rehearsals it is followed to the letter. From the first to the last line. Once installed on the set, you have to think about thousands of things, and it is not possible to stop at details such as “could this or that word be changed?” The way of saying the dialogues, the tone, must be decided beforehand. The same with the staging: everything was clear before we started filming the first scene. But not because I know everything, but because together with the director of photography and the cameraman I had detailed in the script all the framing, camera positions and light directions that we planned to do. It wasn’t a filming like Spielberg’s (laughs), so the ambition was to achieve what we wanted with the elements we had. And it was really very beautiful, because I think we achieved it.
-The framework of the story includes the first general elections in Italy, which took place in 1946. This introduces a very important political aspect into the story, since they were the first elections in which women could participate. Was it always present in the script?
-Absolutely. In Italy, when the film premiered in October last year, we tried to maintain a bit of secrecy, surprise. But it’s something I really like to talk about. The last part of the film takes place precisely on two days that were very important for our story: the first time that women were able to vote in a political suffrage. Something that also coincides with the replacement of the monarchy with a republic. June 2, 1946 is the day of the birth of Italy as a republic. Important, also, because women had that right for the first time. In the documentary images of that day you can see the women with the electoral ballots in their hands and, as the Italian journalist Anna Garofalo wrote at that time, “We squeeze the tickets as if they were love letters”. You have to think that at that moment, during that day, the women felt that they were important beyond the master inside their houses. The state gave them the possibility and the right to be important. There are many relevant women whose names are remembered, those who had to do with the reform of the constitution and who even risked their lives, whom we rightly celebrate. But The idea of the film was to celebrate those other women that no one remembers individually.. All those anonymous women who were educated in obedience, the “ignorant” ones who, however, knew that emancipation involved obtaining rights.
-Did you imagine that the film was going to become such a public success? What were, in your opinion, the reasons for this phenomenon?
-No, how could I have imagined it beforehand? Also, a debut feature. And, on top of that, the first film by a woman. It’s kind of absurd, really, but I’m happy, of course. I think that there was a hunger for a story of this nature. There is a lot of sensitivity in Italy regarding violence against women, but I think the humorous tone we chose to address the topic helped a lot. If it had been a purely dramatic film, also in black and white, the impact would have been different. Instead, the realistic humor of ordinary life helps you get into the story.