Director Paola Cortellesi: ‘This film merged rage with hope and strength’

One Rome morning in 1946, Delia wakes up next to her husband, Ivano, who rolls over and slaps her in the face. Delia receives the blow as a routine event, much like brushing her teeth. The opening scene of There’s Still Tomorrow is shot in black-and-white, in the style and milieu of postwar Italian neorealism. Then, after eight minutes in this seemingly familiar world, a rock song pumps up the mood and Delia, subjugated at home, strides purposefully through the streets of the city like a Rome housewife turned Reservoir Dog.

We are left both laughing and appalled, an artful balance that has helped make There’s Still Tomorrow a phenomenon since it was released in Italy last October. Whatever the feminist qualities of Barbie, this often comic and deeply moving film about male violence and female independence beat the Hollywood blockbuster and everything else at the Italian box office in 2023, making more than €36mn and watched by 5.3mn cinemagoers.

It is the directing debut of star and co-writer Paola Cortellesi, 50, best known as a TV comedian and usually comic film star. She is soft-spoken yet implacable, much like Delia, as she considers her film’s success. “It’s a strange beast — a contemporary film set in the past,” she says from her home in Rome. “Because the [oppressed] life of these women at the time was accepted, and now it doesn’t seem to be, but the reality hasn’t changed that much. I wanted to cast a pebble in the water and see where the ripples take you.”

The popular reaction in Italy to There’s Still Tomorrow was redoubled following the murder on November 11 2023 of 22-year-old student Giulia Cecchettin by her ex-boyfriend, which sparked mass protests against femicide. “There had already been 100 murders of women in Italy that year — one every 72 hours,” Cortellesi says. “The film had been in the cinemas for two weeks, but at that point it took off. Demonstrations followed, which I attended, a mixture of young women and men who wanted to say, enough of this. The film was a catalyst, which people coalesced around.”

There’s Still Tomorrow is no Nil by Mouth, Gary Oldman’s 1997 account of domestic dysfunction on a south London estate, with its near-unwatchably realistic wife-beating. The only direct portrayal of the degree of Ivano’s violence is shot as a musical number, with its moves known to both partners.

“The bruises appear and disappear,” Cortellesi says of this scene, “to show the repetition. It’s a ritual, and so I wasn’t interested in a voyeuristic sense of violence, of the detail of every hit or cut, but to give a sense of what is perpetrated and accepted as a daily occurrence. I also used a light tone, striking that tightrope balance of having a smile appear on your lips, but then feeling almost embarrassed by your reaction.”

The neorealist films that Cortellesi takes as her model, and then subverts, depicted a harsh, impoverished country, where men or women could be victims of cruel love, the most iconic image being Silvana Mangano’s buxom, gum-chewing worker in 1949’s Bitter Rice standing hands-on-hips in a field, shortly before meeting an untimely end.

“Neorealism portrayed something that we as Italians didn’t just see on the big screen,” Cortellesi says. “We lived it, it’s part of our deep history. My film’s world also stems from the stories that I was told by relatives and elders. And history doesn’t just stop or start, so in certain tenements, maybe these women with their hands on hips shouting across the courtyard haven’t altogether disappeared.”

Italian cinema’s starkest previous statement on misogyny may be Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), in which Monica Vitti is threateningly followed and surrounded by boys in an otherwise deserted street, an uncanny eruption of malign masculinity. The baroque slaughter of beautiful young women in the giallo thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s is also blatantly suggestive.

More recently, Silvio Berlusconi’s influence was more enduringly baleful. As clownishly sexist prime minister he was envied for his “bunga bunga” antics by many Italian men while as boss of TV empire Mediaset and (during his premiership) state broadcaster Rai he brought scantily clad women to garish game shows and news programmes.

“With the arrival of private channels, many owned by Berlusconi, we had this objectification of women as just bodies there to be objects of desire,” Cortellesi says. “This went on for decades, so many people grew up with that distorted image. It slowed down any evolution, and now we have to recover lost ground.”

The #MeToo movement’s impact in Italy in 2018 was, for Cortellesi, superficial and misdirected. “It was almost solely centred on sexual advances and violence in the workplace, and naming very well-known perpetrators. It didn’t impinge on the diseased imbalance of power that women suffer anyway, and the fact that, in relationships, women are treated as chattel, so that when you try to break that relationship of belonging to somebody, violence fires up. Maybe now we’re integrating the bigger picture.”

She describes some of the sexism she has suffered. “You’re paid less, automatically. ‘That’s not bad wages for a woman’ was actually an expression in common language. And, before all this, I was a scriptwriter and author, and the only woman around a table of comic writers. Whenever I put forward an idea, the [male producers] would automatically answer the two male writers [instead of] me.”

These experiences inspired Cortellesi’s first hit film as co-writer, 2014’s Do You See Me?, in which she played an architect who, after success in London, must have her ideas fronted, Cyrano-like, by a gay male friend in Italy. There has often been a socially conscious core to her apparently light but relentlessly effective work. She played a factory worker sacked for being pregnant in The Last Will Be the Last (2015) and romanced across class divides in Like a Cat On a Highway (2017). There’s Still Tomorrow is the remarkable climax of this work, a story which, it turns out, millions of her compatriots were waiting for.

“This film merged feelings of rage with love, hope and some strength, so that people didn’t feel powerless,” she says. “After the screenings, not only did people want to talk to me and tell me their own stories, they started talking to each other. After the pandemic’s isolation, to see cinemas filled to the brim with people who then talked to each other is what makes me most proud.”

‘There’s Still Tomorrow’ is in UK cinemas from April 26