There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow, the brand new movie that has simply handed Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to change into the most-watched film in Italy this yr, opens on a home scene. Delia, performed by actress-turned-director Paola Cortellesi, wakes up subsequent to her husband, Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea). “Buongiorno!” she says, brightly. With out a phrase, he slaps her. Arduous. Then, because the soundtrack swells with a 40s romantic tune, Delia will get as much as begin her day. Violent abuse, it seems, is as a lot part of her routine as brushing her hair and getting dressed for work.
It’s a surprising scene. At first, it seems like There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow, shot in stark black-and-white, shall be a tribute to Italian neo-realist classics like Bicycle Thieves and Rome Open Metropolis. However that is no kitchen sink social drama. First come the one-liners: “All the issues began when individuals stopped marrying their cousins!” Ivano’s father-in-law complains to Delia. “My spouse lived like a queen!” Delia reminds him she killed herself by leaping from the fifth ground. “And rightly so,” she provides, wryly.
There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow
Courtesy of CLAUDIO IANNONE
“As a toddler, I bear in mind the tales my grandma and nice grandma would inform me about different girls who lived in the identical courtyard of their neighborhood, girls like Delia who could be subjected to violence, perhaps be overwhelmed up by their husbands or family,” says Cortellesi. “What shocked me was how this tragic factor was thought-about to be regular. For these girls, it was day by day life. However they at all times inform these tales with a contact of irony, of humor. It’s a Roman factor, we individuals from Rome, even once we speak about essentially the most tragic occasions, we have a tendency to inform them with a smile and a joke.”
As Delia leaves her dwelling, the display screen, until then tightly cramped within the 4:3 side ratio typical for neo-realist films, expands to a widescreen 16:9. The 40s soundtrack offers technique to the rocking beat of 1998’s “Calvin” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
“It is a up to date film. It’s set previously, but it surely’s concerning the feminine situation,” says Cortellesi, “and the roots of this patriarchal tradition go deep. They’re rooted previously, however they’re nonetheless very current right now.”
The movie has actually struck a chord. There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow is a runaway field workplace hit, grossing greater than €30.5 million ($33.4 million) so far, making it the second most profitable movie of the yr in Italy, simply behind Gretta Gerwig’s pink-themed blockbuster Barbie at €32 million. Ranked by admissions, There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow is definitely primary, with 4.49 million tickets offered to Barbie‘s 4.39 million. Cortellesi’s movie is already the sixth most profitable Italian film of all time and, by the tip of its run, will leapfrog Roberto Benighi’s Life Is Lovely (1997)—one other interval movie that blended comedy with critical drama —to take the general quantity 5 spot.
Paola Cortellesi on the set of ‘There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow’
Courtesy of Luisa Carcavale
There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow has additionally rekindled discussions about home violence, femicide and girls’s rights in Italy, debates that dominated public discourse for the reason that surprising kidnapping and homicide final month of the 22-year-old scholar, Giulia Cecchettin, and the arrest of her boyfriend for the crime.
“I’ve been attending screenings, introducing the movie and speaking about it with the audiences afterward, and other people come to me and so they share their tales of violence of abuse, or simply discrimination, unfair remedy,” says Cortellesi. “There’s this want and need to debate a topic that was simply there ready to be talked about. This film form of triggered the controversy.”
On November 25, the movie was proven within the Italian Senate to mark the United Nations’ Worldwide Day for the Elimination of Violence Towards Ladies. There have been screenings for schoolchildren throughout the nation.
“To this point round 300,000 highschool college students have gone to see the movie,” says Andrea Scrosati, Group COO and CEO, Continental Europe at Fremantle, the media group which owns Wildside, the Italian producer of There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow. “Colleges are utilizing it as a technique to focus on home violence and feminine empowerment,”
‘There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow’
Courtesy of CLAUDIO IANNONE
They’re topics, says Cortellesi, she has been “revolving round” her whole profession. Certainly one of Italy’s most well-known, and beloved, movie and TV stars, she lower her tooth as a comic on radio and TV, doing impressions of politicians, celebrities and musicians, earlier than shifting to the massive display screen, writing and appearing in a few of the nation’s most profitable rom-coms and household dramedies. Her movies, many directed by her real-life accomplice Riccardo Milani, are mainstream leisure that, beneath the floor, sort out tough points, together with social disparity, home abuse and Italy’s staunchly patriarchal tradition.
There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow is full of situational comedy and sight gags — a romantic interlude involving chocolate-smeared tooth is especially candy — and even a show-stopping musical quantity. However the laughs are at all times in service of a deeper social message. An early scene within the movie exhibits Ivano laying into Delia after a perceived slight. The beating is staged as a dance, with each companions going by means of the motions, reenacting a sample handed down from technology to technology.
“Paola is likely one of the most refined and clever but in addition empathic artists round,” says Scrosati. “She’s addressed related points, political points her whole profession, however she’s by no means lecturing.”
Delia is just not some idealized feminist. Firstly of the movie, all she needs for is an efficient marriage for her daughter and is saving up cash for her marriage ceremony costume. Ivano, regardless of his violence, is proven as pitiful, and comicly silly. Much less a monster than a buffon.
“We wished to make him an fool in order that there could be no danger of anybody idealizing or imitating him,” says Cortellesi. “It’s a means of exorcising the worry of the monster. While you giggle at somebody’s stupidity, your worry of them disappears.”
There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow is about in opposition to a selected political historical past. It’s set in 1946, forward of a referendum the place Italians have been requested to vote to stay a monarchy or to change into a republic. For the primary time within the nation’s historical past, girls got the vote. The politics bubbles alongside within the background — there are posters and graffiti, characters toss off strains about democracy and socialism — however even native audiences, says Scorsati, overlook the historical past and get caught up within the story of Delia’s emancipation.
Paola Cortellesi on set There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow
Courtesy of Luisa Carcavale
“Really, the film is a little bit of trick, a fraud,” says Cortellesi. “We plant clues all through the film however as a result of we use these completely different genres, the romantic comedy, a little bit of thriller, a little bit of musical, individuals deal with Delia and begin pondering, like all these different films, that she’ll be freed by one other man, a superb man.”
It’s solely by the tip, she says, that audiences understand There’s Nonetheless Tomorrow is a love story, “but it surely isn’t about romantic love, it’s concerning the love of a mom in the direction of her daughter…I wished to inform this story for my daughter, who’s 11 now, and for the children of her technology,” says Cortellesi.
The movie’s success has transcended native politics, with each Italy’s far-right authorities and the left-wing opposition becoming a member of within the debate round home violence the film has sparked.
“It has nothing to do with politics, however with individuals being fed up with the present scenario, the place a girl in Italy is killed each 72 hours simply because she is a girl, killed by her boyfriend or accomplice,” says Cortellesi. “This isn’t a brand new statistic, however one which’s been fixed by means of completely different governments, left and proper. Individuals are fed up of listening to this similar story again and again. They wish to do one thing to assist change the tradition. To interrupt this circle of violence.”
