In post-war Rome, in May 1946, Allied military troops roam the streets in Jeeps. The city is experiencing poverty and fueled by the institutional referendum and the election of the Constituent Assembly on June 2 and 3.
A woman, Delia, is the wife of the abusive Ivano and mother of three children, including the teenage Marcella. Between domestic engagements she nurses her sullen father-in-law Ottorino and does sewing and repairs for various city stores, as well as laundry for the wealthy. The woman's friends include Nino, a car mechanic who loves her; Marisa, a market greengrocer and witty optimist; and William, an African American soldier who wants to help her.
Delia's life is happily disrupted by Marcella's engagement to Giulio Moretti, the young scion of a well-to-do family who owe their prosperity to their local ice-cream parlor. Ivano is aware of the pleasant financial gain a marriage between the two could bring. After a Sunday lunch Delia prepared for her future in-laws (and the bossy behaviour of Giulio) she realizes, that her daughter would be headed for a marriage similar to hers, with regular physical abuse and humiliation. With William's help, she blows up her future son-in-law's bar establishment so that his parents will see their wealth disappear and leave town. Marcella is devastated, but Delia knows she has done the right thing: she has decided to fight back in the face of her inferior condition thanks to the encouragement the arrival in the mail of her first voter's card represented. Delia had saved 8000 Lire from her work, hidden from her grasping husband, originally intended to buy a wedding dress for Marcella. Instead, the money will go to finance her daughter's education.
On June 2, when the time comes to vote between the monarchy and the republic and to elect the Constituent Assembly, Delia wants to participate and looks for an excuse to escape her husband-master, but the sudden death of her father-in-law complicates her life as she sees her house filled with relatives and friends. This does not prevent her from going to the polls the next day, her first experience of this alongside many other Italian women.[12] Delia unknowingly loses her card in her house before heading to the polls - it is found first by Ivano and then by Marcella, both of whom pursue Delia. Marcella gives the document to Delia and she is able to vote.
Film screenwriter, director and lead actress Paola Cortellesi, in 2009.
The film was conceived by Paola Cortellesi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda,[13] based on the lives of women after the Italian campaign in World War II, inspired by the lives of Cortellesi's grandmother and great-grandmother.[14][15]
"It was a natural decision. The story of the film is fictional, but there is a lot of my family's stories. I am half Roman and half Abruzzese. My mother came to Rome when she was six years old and spent her very early childhood here. But many of the stories I drew inspiration from are from my grandmother. It is also the reason why I imagined the work in black and white. When you are reminded of images from the past in Rome, they are never in color. The Roman courtyards where everything was put on the square. People lived together, there was no discretion, however, it was beautiful. The Rome of There's Still Tomorrow is very far from the Rome of today. [...] Social life was different. Maybe the bourgeois families were the only discreet ones. [...] and we staged a total incommunicability, which represents the difference in social class in Rome, as in the rest of Italy. Rome, however, is not just a basin. Rome is many things. There is the Rome of the center, the Rome of the well-to-do neighborhoods, then there is the popular Rome, the Rome of the suburbs, of the borgate"
Promotion and distribution
The film premiered as the opening film at the Rome Film Festival 2023, it was released in Italian theaters on October 26, 2023.[20]
Reception
Box office
There's Still Tomorrow debuted with €1.6 million on its first weekend, finishing on top of the Italian box office and marking the highest opening weekend for an Italian production in 2023.[7] The film surpassed €20 million on 23 November, becoming the highest-grossing Italian film since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic passing Il grande giorno (2022) by Aldo, Giovanni & Giacomo and the highest-grossing film ever directed by a female Italian director.[21][22] With €32.4 million it became the highest-grossing film in Italy in 2023 surpassing Barbie, the most successful film of the year by number of tickets sold, and the ninth highest-grossing film ever in the country, beating Life Is Beautiful (1997) by Roberto Benigni.[23][24]
The film received positive reviews from Italian and international film critics, who appreciated its direction and screenplay in addressing issues related to feminism and patriarchy, as well as the acting skills of the actors, especially Cortellesi herself, Valerio Mastandrea, and Romana Maggiora Vergano.
Paolo Mereghetti, reviewing the film for Il Corriere della Sera, wrote that Cortellesi's work is "decidedly remarkable" as the directorial choices "try to find an unobvious balance between a realistic key and a more exemplary and didactic one," finding that some solutions have "naiveté" are "a consequence of the ambition and originality put into the field." The critic claimed that the film aims to "broaden the discourse of Delia and the other women toward a dimension that is no longer just individual but finally collective and social," and that although the film deals with themes "of violence and mistreatment," the project "never shows in its stark realism."[26] Boris Sollazzo of The Hollywood Reporter Roma appreciated the director's ability to take "shots, especially the more emphatic and paroxysmal ones, in a counterintuitive way, to emphasize normality, of a walk or a fight," while the cinematography and editing come across as "as abrupt as it should be, retracing an even visual language of the time, albeit with modern faces and some directorial solutions."[27]
Alessandro De Simone of Ciak also wrote that the film sets itself on the comedy genre with a "courageous contamination between musicalItalian neorealism and postmodernism" and "veering at one point almost toward giallo." The journalist noted that although it does not turn out to be all balanced, the script "brings a higher cinematic level" to the project, appreciating "the comic timing and all the performances," especially by Emanuela Fanelli, Paola Tiziana Cruciani, and "the surprise, beautiful" Romana Maggiori Vergani.[28] Dwelling on the themes addressed by the film, Luisa Garribba Rizzitelli of HuffPost italia associated it with the terms "unveiling" and "self-determination," believing that it presents "something revolutionary and full of hope" since it is not addressed "to women [...], but turning to mates, brothers, fathers, [who] can only mirror themselves in the sequence of merciless episodes: the male overpower spoiled by the privileges of the still patriarchal culture." Rizzitelli affirmed that Cortellesi "is showing them not a past time, but the mirror of what is still there today" by imposing in the film's finale "precisely on men, to decide which side they are on, determining, their position with respect to the struggles of feminism."[29]
In a four out of five star review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that the film is a "storytelling with terrific confidence and panache", which "pays homage to early pictures by Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini" through "a piece of narrative sleight-of-hand that borders on magic-neorealism, performed with shameless theatrical flair and marvellously composed in luminous monochrome".[30] Jonathan Romney of Financial Times described the film as "a thoughtful, emotionally satisfying, immensely entertaining one-off, with an ending that smartly dynamites our expectations", prizing Davide Leone cameraworks and Cortellesi direction which "pulls some clever, sometimes risky tricks, shifting between melodrama, farce and some uncomfortable heightened moments".[31] In his review, Screen International critic Allan Hunter paired the film to the classic Italian neorealism cinema, and described it as "an unashamed, old-fashioned melodrama [which] develops into a more considered tale of small victories on the road to female empowerment."[32]
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