Come, sit down and I'll explain to you. Humor is used for a lot of things, and also as anesthesia, to
“put the scalpel into serious topics,”
as the Spanish author Alejandro Cuevas recently said. Because that is exactly what the director of
There Will Always Be a Tomorrow
is now doing with her camera , the Italian film that has just been released here and we will have to go see it to understand how the most dramatic things can be said (and shown)
with resources of comedy.
Effectively.
Scene 1
: Double bed. She wakes up and greets him with a
“buongiorno”
. She receives a slap in response. Because yes, point blank. A slap that we will all receive in the audience, just to wake us up from the start. That will be the rhythm of the film, set in post-war Italy.
Scene 2:
A prostrate old man, in pajamas, listens to how his son hits the woman. Over and over again, day after day. He tries to “help” in some way his daughter-in-law, who is the one who looks after him and takes care of him. Cynical, the old curmudgeon then calls Ivano, and from the bottom of the bed explains to him how things are:
“Women don't have to be hit every day. You have to do what I did: I hit your mother only once. Strong and ready.”
The fight against patriarchy and gender violence has been told in a thousand ways in recent years, but the one that Paola Cortellesi proposes in her debut film is so original that in Italy
it surpassed the multi-award-winning
Oppenheimer
in viewers . Because the director, who is also a comedian and the star of her own film, takes risks and is not afraid of anything.
Except for political incorrectness.
The camera does not focus on the story of suffering and sacrifice of Delia, a housewife condemned to sewing, cleaning, caring for the sick and putting up with her husband because
“poor, he fought in the war”
, but instead resorts to poetic flight to show how Ivano hits Delia.
And how does he do it? With careful
choreography in black and white
. It is the way he finds to transform the
domestic drama into something else
, into a kind of dance where the slaps fly as if they were part of a grotesque musical comedy. Works? Very much.
Otherwise the blows would be intolerable.
And it serves to denounce, for example, that in Argentina there is a femicide every 27 hours, and that the rights won are not eternal: they must be defended every day.
The debut director also focuses on the first time that women were able to vote in Italy. In the images that she sought for documentation, I could see them with the electoral ballots in their hands,
pressed against their chest, “as if they were love letters
,” according to an Italian journalist wrote at that time. The State then gave them the right to be important, and Cortellesi's idea was
to celebrate them with humor.
Because for her
“the realistic humor of ordinary life helps to enter History.”
As in
Life is Beautiful
, once again Italian cinema dares to use comedy to tell the worst human dramas.