There's Still Tomorrow

There's Still Tomorrow (C'è ancora domani) is a 2023 Italian black-and-white comedy drama film in neorealist style, directed by Paola Cortellesi in her directorial debut. Set in postwar 1940s Italy, it follows Delia breaking traditional family patterns and aspiring to a different future, after receiving a mysterious letter. It stars Paola Cortellesi, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Emanuela Fanelli, Valerio Mastandrea, Francesco Centorame, Vinicio Marchioni and Giorgio Colangeli.

The film won three prizes at the Rome Film Festival, the Nastro d'Argento of 2024 and is the most successful film at the Italian box office in 2023, and the 9th highest-grossing film in the country. It was critically acclaimed by Italian film critics, who appreciated its direction and screenplay in dealing with issues related to feminism and patriarchy, as well as the acting, particularly of Paola Cortellesi, Emanuela Fanelli and Valerio Mastandrea. It received a leading 19 nominations at the 69th David di Donatello, and won 6 awards: Best New Director and Best Actress (for Cortellesi), Best Supporting Actress (for Fanelli), Best Original Screenplay, the David Youth Award and the David Audience Award.

Plot
Inner city of Rome, May 1946. Allied military troops roam the streets in jeeps. The city is torn between the poverty left behind by World War II and the desire for change fueled by the institutional referendum and the election of the Constituent Assembly on June 2 and 3.

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 occasional sewing for various city stores, as well as laundry for the wealthy. The woman also has a few allies in this hard life: Nino, a car mechanic who loves her; Marisa, a market greengrocer and witty optimistic friend and William, an African American soldier who would like to help her out.

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 prosperous economic status to the local bar they run; father Ivano, with this in mind, is aware of the pleasant financial gain a marriage between the two could bring. After an extensive Sunday warm lunch Delia prepared for her future in-laws, and the bossy behaviour of Giulio, she realizes, however, that her daughter would be headed for a marriage similar to hers, with regular physical abuse and humiliation. Therefore, 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.

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 in the matter as it is for many other women in Italy. Having lost her card in the house, found first by Ivano and then by Marcella, she sees herself pursued by both: he will not be able to stop her from asserting her rights, she will return the valid document in time to cast her vote.

Cast

 * Paola Cortellesi as Delia
 * Valerio Mastandrea as Ivano
 * Romana Maggiora Vergano as Marcella
 * Emanuela Fanelli as Marisa
 * Giorgio Colangeli as Sor Ottorino
 * Vinicio Marchioni as Nino
 * Francesco Centorame as Giulio Moretti
 * Lele Vannoli as Alvaro
 * Paola Tiziana Cruciani as Sora Franca
 * Yonv Joseph as William
 * Alessia Barela as Orietta
 * Federico Tocci as Mario Moretti
 * Priscilla Micol Marino as Sora Giovanna
 * Maria Chiara Orti as Sora Rosa
 * Silvia Salvatori as Sora Elvira
 * Mattia Baldo as Sergio
 * Gianmarco Filippini as Franchino
 * Gabriele Paolocà as Peppe

Production
The film is an idea of Paola Cortellesi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Furio Andreotti and Giulia Calenda, based on the lives of women after the Italian campaign in World War II, inspired by Cortellesi's grandmother and great-grandmother life.

The film was produced by Mario Gianani and Lorenzo Gangarossa for Wildside and Vision Distribution. The shooting of the film took place in Testaccio, Rome, while the interior settings were shot at Cinecittà Studios. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Roma, Cortellesi explained the decision to set the film in Rome: "'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.

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. 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. 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.

Critical response
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." 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."

Alessandro De Simone of Ciak also wrote that the film sets itself on the comedy genre with a "courageous contamination between musical Italian 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. 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."

In a four out of five stars 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". 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". 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."