'There's Still Tomorrow': A riveting depiction of a postwar housewife

It’s rare, but sometimes a first-time director makes a movie that is just about perfect – and that is the case with Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow, which opened in theaters around Israel on August 15.

It’s rare, of course, that anyone makes such a movie. But Cortellesi, best known in her native Italy as a comic actress and singer, seems to have taken a subject about which she is passionate – the plight of a poor Italian housewife just after World War II – and turned it into a story that is both very particular, but which evokes universal emotions. 

When I first read the description of the film, and especially the fact that it is in black and white, I was concerned that it would be what some critics used to call “Prozac Cinema” – a movie so bleak that you need an anti-depressant to get you up out of your seat afterwards. Generally, to involve the audience, even in the saddest stories, a film must be engaging. If it can provide a note of grace – a hint of redemption that feels earned and real, rather than a manipulation designed to put a smile on the viewers’ faces – that makes it truly affecting. When a story is too dark, we instinctively turn away, shield ourselves. But here, Cortellesi manages to make us fall in love with her heroine Delia, whom she plays, and tells her story in a way that we simply can’t stop hoping for a way out for her.

For many of us, what we know about Italian women in the post-war period comes from Elana Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet novels (the first book of which, My Brilliant Friend, was made into a good Italian miniseries, but the books are still much more interesting). There’s Still Tomorrow is set in Rome in 1946, rather than Naples, but Delia’s situation bears much resemblance to those of the characters in the Quartet books. Her family is poor and lives in a neighborhood still reeling from the war, which will remind you of Italian neo-realist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves and Roberto Rossellini’s Open City. American soldiers are still stationed on some of the streets, and Delia is curious about them, befriending one African American GI.

She keeps house for her husband, Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea), who is a petty tyrant, believing that, because he is her husband and has a job and is a veteran, he is her master. Delia also works at a number of jobs, including as a seamstress, and takes care of her ungrateful, arrogant father-in-law. A beautiful, industrious wife like Delia would please any decent man, but her intelligence and sense of herself amid so much privation irritates Ivano. 

Early on, the film shocks us by showing how casually he is violent to her. When she says good morning to him, she doesn’t know if she will receive a polite greeting in return, or a slap in the face. The uncertainty over when she is going to be physically abused in her own home is part of what makes her situation so awful. When she has done something that displeases him, she knows a beating is coming, but just being herself is enough to provoke him into real violence any time of the day or night.

Stylized photography

The violence between them is photographed in a stylized way. Sometimes when she expects a blow, he draws her into a romantic dance, set to romantic Italian pop tunes of the era (the soundtrack also mixes things up, at one point including a song by Outkast), and for a few moments, the dance is like a scene from a Chaplin movie. 

This was a risky choice, because it could have seemed to be trivializing the violence, but the ritualistic dance numbers show her bewildering experience of it. She must have loved him, or at least liked him, before they married, and the dances show what remains of that between them, as well as spotlighting the physicality that contains the seeds of his aggression. Cortellesi and her co-screenwriters, Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda, pull off these moments, among the most vivid in the film, very well.

Delia had a gentler boyfriend once – who is now a mechanic in the neighborhood – before she married Ivano, and the movie raises the idea that maybe she can still change her life, as it does with the American soldier. 

But she has an even bigger problem: Her oldest child, 18-year-old Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano), has fallen in love with a young man from a well-off store-owning family. He seems nice enough and all seems well, but then he demands that she quit her job when they are married, and Delia can see that he will lead Marcella into the same life of powerless domestic servitude that she lives. How she copes with her daughter’s engagement is one of the key plotlines of the movie and is especially reminiscent of Ferrante.

There are hints of a kind of escape plan Delia is preparing for herself, and perhaps for her daughter, and they provide a suspenseful underpinning to the entire film. How it plays out is one of the film’s beautiful surprises and elevates the movie into something much more than one woman’s story.

Cortellesi gives a luminous performance, with a great sense of presence and timing, which is often the case with actors trained in comedy. Vergana convincingly conveys Marcella’s alternating love for and disgust with her mother, and her feeling that she will never allow herself to be brought so low, even as you can see her walking into a similarly abusive marriage. Mastandrea makes Ivano into something more than he should be, a guy who can charm when he needs to, so that you can imagine having a beer with him – if you didn’t know how he treats his wife.

Just when you think you know where the story is heading, Cortellesi switches gears, but you will hang on, waiting to see what happens. She has created a heroine who captures hearts and whose story will stay with you long after you leave the theater.