20/10/2023 - The debut as director of actress Paola Cortellesi is a successful fresco on the condition of women in 1940s Italy, with an excellent balance of drama and humour

Delia wakes up every morning with a slap from her husband Ivano. She rises up, prepares breakfast for their three sons, empties her bedridden father-in-law's urinal, and then leaves the house to confront, relentlessly, her daily routine, made up of various underpaid jobs (repairing linens, adjusting umbrellas, hanging sheets), useful to scrape together some money that is never enough. The whole day, she continues to get slaps from all sides. Because Delia isn’t only poor, she is also a woman.

It is with a fesco on the condition of women in the mid-1940s, in Italy, that opened the 18th edition of the Rome Film Fest, with Paola Cortellesi’s surprising debut as director. There Is Still Tomorrow [+see also:
trailer
film profile], selected in competition, is a black-and-white film that, winking at Neorealism, portrays post-war difficulties, the American soldiers that bestow chocolate, the popular and genuine Rome with the comrades in the courtyard and the babies on the street, but most of all shines a spotlight on an ultra-patriarchal society where women didn’t yet have the right to vote, let alone the right to speak. A film that talks about domestic violence, whether physical or psychological, but without voyeurism, but with a salutary thread of irony and cynicism that makes the picture even more effective, because it highlights the absurd banality of this violence.

Written by Cortellesi with Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda (already her accomplices in the writing of Scusate se esisto, an intelligent comedy on the discrimination of women in the workplace), There Is Still Tomorrow reunites in the front of the camera Paola Cortellesi and Valerio Mastandrea in the roles of husband and wife (which they already were in Figli). This time, the latter plays a bully, who has fought in two wars (with which he claims to justify everything), with a father at home, Ottorino (Giorgio Colangeli), who dispenses advice such as “your wife should not be beaten ten times, but one good time.” Delia bears it all silently, she has been taught that she is worth nothing and is a mother focused on her duty, and what she cares about most is the future of her daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano), promised wife for Giulio (Francesco Centorame), a young man from a good family who, for the girl, embodies the guarantee of a better life, or perhaps not.

Delia finds comforts in her greengrocer friend Marisa (Emanuela Fanelli, and it is a pleasure to see her and Cortellesi act together, two of the bravest Italian comic actresses), in an old love that never was lived (Nino, played by Vinicio Marchioni) and in a mysterious letter she receives one day, and which gives our heroine the courage to change things and whose important content we will only discover at the end.

Inspired by the stories of grandmothers and great-grandmothers, “the many ordinary women who have built, unsuspecting, our country”, specifies the director, Cortellesi’s film is an audacious debut, with directing ideas that can please more or less, but are very precise and reasoned (the idea to choreograph the fight scenes, for instance), and with a message that arrives loud and clear. The whole finds a natural equilibrium between drama and humour, with a plot that offers news developments up to the last minute and an emotional opening from the personal to the collective.

There Is Still Tomorrow was produced by  Wildside and Vision Distribution, in collaboration with Sky and Netflix; the film comes out in Italian cinemas on 26 October through Vision Distribution.

(Translated from Italian)