The psychologist’s column, edited by Cesare Ammendola
“There’s still tomorrow”, I saw it yesterday. Paola Cortellesi’s blockbuster was released in theaters last year. I watched it late, like many of you, on TV this week. Critics and audiences are also divided internally. Nowadays in Italy the fans argue about everything. There are those who call it a masterpiece and those who call it horror. (And many still remain convinced that it was rigor.)
Smart and disappointing operation? I wouldn’t be so harsh. Success is not a fault. And in any case, a near triumph (candidate for 19, let’s say 19, statuettes of Donatello’s David) should be interpreted. And these three ingredients are not enough to explain it: the sympathetic popularity of the Cortellesi character, the incandescent theme on the brazier of ideological divisions (and political polarizations), the psychological relevance of crime news in the imagination of an entire nation. In fact, in many other similar precedents in Italian cinema it didn’t go as well as at the national Paola.
Ergo, I see it differently. I believe that the success of the story is due to what is invisible about it. In the power of a meaning that subliminally touches the female unconscious of millions of men and women. For the simple and astonishing reason that this film is not what it seems. It is eminently not a work of denunciation of patriarchy and gender violence, nor the representation of the social drama for the liberation of women/wives, in the war against discrimination and inequalities. It is first and foremost the story of the most ancient and powerful thing in the history of mankind: a mother’s love for her daughter. A mission, more than a feeling, an obsession, more than magic. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that the perfect and masterful acting act is that of the actress who gives life to her daughter, the authentic predestined protagonist of a secret narrative.
The mother sacrifices herself, works like a mule and puts money aside for her daughter’s studies, puts aside her own happiness, does not run away with her beloved leaving her parents alone, covers for her daughter, takes the blame and the beatings for a carelessness on the part of the young woman, she commissions a crime in order to steal her daughter from a presumably ignoble fate similar to hers, distracts herself from her own individual fulfillment, transcends the atavistic need to guarantee her own physical safety. In short, nothing could be further from an intransigent feminism of manner. Here’s the scandal (which we don’t say).
Whether she was aware of it or not, whether this was her intention or not, Paola Cortellesi staged the prodigious strength of the abyss, the sacred motive of conception, pregnancy, birth, care, universal motherhood, in plot of an elusive complicity between two women. In an animal and secular spirituality, desired by an unattainable religiosity and beauty. Since the creation of all things.
In light of this observation, I am not completely convinced by the attitude of those who denounce the mediocrity of the artistic object praised everywhere in the desert of criticism (today subordinate to the logic of the box office), of those who judge the work on the level of dramaturgy and syntax, of those who see an unresolved direction that decides the emphatic characterization of the characters in the poses, movements and mimicry, which end up sinking into a jam of clichés and clichés devoid of acting expressiveness.
Cortellesi is Paola, she is not Rossellini. The mixture of neorealistic styles and dreamy and dreamy codes belongs to her authorial work. The calligraphic black and white, the suburban settings, the atmospheres of the villages still painted since the end of the war, the register chosen in the unrepresented representation of the scenes of physical violence, all these elements at times risk being lost among the nebulae of stylistic hesitation and the creature could appear unresolved, caricature-like in the fragmented heart of a senseless and surreal choreography and grotesque even in the ballets and dialogues. But this is. Like it or not.
Finally, some viewers say they are disappointed and disconcerted by the ending in which, despite some suggestive and misleading ad hoc allusions, the elopement of love does not blossom with the gentle of youthful flowers, the escape from oppression and domestic violence. No, none of this, the protagonist, in her earthly parable, as a great turning point? Escaping in great secrecy to a beloved polling station, to finally express, not her right to psychophysical safety, but her right to choose between Monarchy and Republic. A possible declination of a possible individual and collective revolution, a symbolic and conscious act of rebellion and emancipation of Italian women. Perhaps.
In short, someone found the wrong film on a linguistic and formal level and at times surreal, slow, even pathetic. I loved her very tepidly. Without internal clamor. It’s not a cult. It is not a masterpiece if not Fellinesque. But I believe that, by virtue of some ideological extremism and narcissistic intellectualism of self-referential niches, the reviews of the few detractors were not balanced. Interpretation keys clinging to an outdated and nostalgic aesthetic, anti-consumerist and contemptuous and disdainful towards the sole dominant and opiate idea of the market and entertainment never help.
I believe that the director intended to weave a score based on sarcasm. And that, without wanting to, she filmed the first scene of the birth of everything as if with a cell phone: the secret smile between two women. A mother and her daughter. And that’s enough. And that’s all.
