The first slap comes before the opening credits. “Good morning,” Delia says to her husband Ivano when she wakes up, whereupon he slaps her and then gets up without a word. It’s not a big drama, that’s just how it goes, the film seems to tell us, and the scene is staged a bit in a laconic, humorous way, although you might be a little frightened by the involuntary laughter. That captures the tone of the surprise hit of the last Italian cinema year quite well: you laugh quite often, but there’s little funny here.
Because “Tomorrow is another day” is, as the opening scene already reveals, first and foremost a film about domestic violence. More specifically: about the violence that husbands inflict on their wives day in and day out. The extent to which this form of violence was part of unquestioned everyday life in Italy in the 1950s was explained by Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Tetralogy” to numerous readers in Germany in the last decade – hard material, but not in the form of depressive miserabilism came along, but rather as an exuberantly epic and at the same time incredibly accessible novel cycle. The directorial debut of actress Paola Cortellesi, who is best known in Italy as a comedic actress, follows a similar line.
The black and white images in which she says “Tomorrow is another day” almost seem a bit like a mocking comment on any form of classicism or cinematic nostalgia, because the hard, high-contrast digital black and white doesn’t look that really retro. It looks more like what it is in the end: a very contemporary film that covers the past like a camouflage, without any transfiguration and without being completely absorbed in this historicization. Just as he does in the one violent scene that we are shown with brutal clarity – most of the everyday attacks take place off-screen, we leave the crime scene just like the children, who, in the face of Ivano’s mercilessly threatening gaze, know exactly what they are doing Mother is about to come – dance is used as a stylistic device.
The fight becomes a choreography, “Tomorrow is another day” becomes a musical for a moment, and the drop of blood that runs from Delia’s nose, like the deep black strangulation marks on her neck, only appears for a second before it fades out of the film image, yes, is spirited away. This device does not serve to mitigate the emotional impact of the stylized violence – quite the opposite: everything is much, much worse, and you know it very well, that’s what the pictures tell us, and what happens in complicity with our not wanting to see Hidden away, its effect surpasses any calculated, realistic depiction conceivable at this point. A contrast emerges that characterizes Cortellesi’s film as a whole.
In Italy, “Tomorrow is another day” became the surprise blockbuster of the last cinema year, even leaving Greta Gerwig’s pop-feminist global success “Barbie” behind. The fact that it could continue its triumph at the German box office is at least suggested by the great success of a series of previews – in a clever move – in numerous German cinemas on International Women’s Day on March 8th. This would not only be a wish for the film, but also for the audience and German cinemas, because Cortellesi’s film is a success that could not have been predicted. A period piece in black and white on the subject of violence in marriage, which towards the end veers towards an empowering agitprop pamphlet on the subject of women’s suffrage, directed by a debut director who is completely unknown, at least outside of Italy – that doesn’t necessarily sound like an international art house hit. Nevertheless, it is films like this that the German cinema landscape needs right now.
The fact that cinema is currently at the beginning of a major period of change can hardly be ignored. The recipes for success of the last ten or twenty years, which mainstream and arthouse cinema have become too limited in using, have become stale: between endless IP blockbuster series, reboots and shared universes for the multiplexes on the one hand, and off-the-shelf, feel-good arthouse kitsch for them On the other hand, in arthouse and art house cinemas that have long been visited only by the best agers, the hunger for new, fresh voices (and, yes, that too: the revival of classic forms that have long been abandoned by cinema) is now obvious – especially among a young audience that takes the promise of cinema seriously and expects experiences and stories there that it has not seen before. The cinema audience’s openness to new material, new filmmakers and new faces on the screen is perhaps greater at the moment than it has been in a quarter of a century, and a surprise success like that of “Tomorrow is Another Day” can certainly give rise to optimism for the future even the European art house cinema, which has been languishing all too anemic for years.
Jochen Werner
Tomorrow is also a day – Italien 2023 – OT: There is still tomorrow – Director: Paola Cortellesi – Darsteller: Paola Cortellesi, Valreio Mastandrea, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Emanuela Fanelli, Giorgio Colangeli – Lauzeit: 118 Minuten.