While I think about writing about There’s Still Tomorrow, the debut film directed by actress and screenwriter Paola Cortellesi, the current context in Spain is that of a president of the government—for many, the only politically effective dam against fascism and corrupt regression—who has decided to stop for a few days to reflect on his future after suffering a political and media siege furiously directed against his wife. Last night, shortly before the end of the day, he published a letter to the public in which he put romantic love ahead of his professional/political career, sowing with that act a multifaceted debate that finally leads to the real underlying problem that is essential address: the soft judicial coup led by some togas.
Lately, in a more personal context that I would define as my environment, some friends have broken up with their male partners and others are at least considering doing so. They talk about the reasons, they reflect on their current situation and what they have experienced in recent months and years. Listening to them is very interesting from the outside, although above all painful to see and imagine. As if your mind leaves your body and hears and sees everything from the outside, as if none of it can be real because it can’t be possible. It is hard, especially, because in the end it goes beyond debates about whether romantic love and the significance of family break the support networks for abused women; about the extent to which the existence of “evil” men serves to lower the bar for the “good man” so low that it is enough with helping at home and have some love for their children; not even about whether the role of those who support them is to be there and “take care” when they are needed or if they have to look for the abuser to kill him or teach him a lesson as a fair response. It’s something real, suddenly.
Love, family, politics (and electoral elections that show that the female vote avoids absolute majorities of the extreme right). How we relate to each of these elements and how they are all really the same: the life that we are given and that, especially if you are born a woman, you are already part of a movement. In the case of There’s Still Tomorrow, a film that is born and developed from a female perspective from beginning to end, consciously begins by showing the day of a woman who is, in addition to being a housewife, also a nurse and a seamstress to make some extra money at home. It presents, in a few minutes, the context and its environment with a precision that opens the doors to a neoreality so eloquent and conscious that what is truly surprising is how it is able to do so, balancing the tone in each scene, offering comedy, drama and romance with a creativity and elegance so personal that it would be capable of making it fashionable again to release movie titles about Italian couples by adding “Italian style” at the end, if it weren’t for the fact that that title would trivialize a really serious topic in this case.
There’s Still Tomorrow is a beautiful film, although it is such a tragic story. It leaves you with the impression of having seen something beautiful and hopeful
The film by Paola Cortellesi, in which she also stars and which places us in post-war Italy, shows the past as a place in which almost all personal relationships are terrible, but fortunately not all of them. The director, accompanied by Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda in the script, confronts individualism with the role of the community and is able to build an optimistic and hopeful discourse based on the dynamics of abuse, patriarchy, fascism, poverty, resentment or the romantic ideal and what it causes. And she does all this with an admirable freshness, with a musical taste that gives even more pleasure —Lele Marchitelli, a regular with Paolo Sorrentino, signs as composer; I don’t know if also as a selector of songs that are purposely anachronistic—and with a very different look than the ones we are used to seeing (for whatever reason). Where the author not only vindicates the dignity of women; along the way it is also capable of making people laugh, cry (perhaps) and laugh again, until reaching an ending that, although it can be seen as a little bit tricky, is actually so exciting and effective that it is the best possible ending from the rhetoric of the film itself, thanks also to characters (and actors) who shine with their own light in each shot.
I know that it is naive to assume that cinema can change people’s points of view, but I do believe that this film can be capable of generating at least a different murmur, both from those who dissect the films, contextualize them, analyze and interpret them, like those who have gone to the cinema solely to be entertained. I would say, in that sense, that it is a perfect film for both extremes (and for the rest of the extremists, if cinema is still capable of speaking and dialoguing with the public).
I watched, liked and rated There’s Still Tomorrow on Wednesday Apr 24, 2024.
(Madrid, 1987) Novelist by vocation, SEO specialist by profession. Music lover, cinephile and reading lover, but in “amateur” mode.