There’s Still Tomorrow film review — clever and entertaining movie about an abusive marriage

Paola Cortellesi’s There’s Still Tomorrow was 2023’s number one attraction at the Italian box office, beating even Barbie — and we’re talking about a black-and-white film channelling the style of postwar neorealist cinema and such revered classics as Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City. If this makes it sound like an earnest cinephile exercise, it’s anything but — as proved by the opening credits, in which heroine Delia (Cortellesi herself) walks through the streets of 1946 Rome to the punk-funk of US indie band the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

For the most part, though, Cortellesi — an established comedy star directing for the first time — offers a cannily precise evocation of the world associated with directors such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Her Delia is a put-upon working-class woman whose strutting, pompous husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea) is prone to beat her on a whim. While her teenage daughter looks set to marry the boy of her dreams — a toothy smiler from a snooty, well-heeled family — Delia still quietly hankers after the one that got away, a simpatico car mechanic.

As classic Italian heroines go, Delia has little of the boldness and brio of Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren — she’s reticent, dutiful, careworn, and Cortellesi plays her with occasionally too deliberate an aim on our heartstrings. But as director and co-writer, Cortellesi pulls some clever, sometimes risky tricks, shifting between melodrama, farce and some uncomfortable heightened moments: notably, a scene of full-on domestic violence staged as a balletic pas de deux between Delia and Ivano, the same old dance they’ve gone through so many times.

With meticulous design, and Davide Leone’s pitch-perfect camerawork, this is a thoughtful, emotionally satisfying, immensely entertaining one-off, with an ending that smartly dynamites our expectations. Suffice to say that it isn’t men who will save Delia, but her own determination, and the changes her country is going through.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from April 26