There’s still tomorrow: the classic films cited by Paola Cortellesi

Noand you will have heard of it for sure. There is still tomorrowthe by Paola Cortellesi it’s grossing very well (to date the loot has reached 14 million). We laugh, we are moved, we feel anger and relief. Above all, there is applause on the screen, reports of roars and probable standing ovations arrive from the cinemas. At school, however, as if we were in the 1940s of the film, the teachers load the classes onto buses: management of the multiplex (who knows if with the confiscation of smartphones so as not to interrupt the emotion).

In short, this film must be seen, even more than once (multiple viewings also come from the news). The critical voices (few) and those in favor (many) count for little), the wave of consensus is now a river of word of mouth that happily underlines the “for once”. For once at the cinema there is an Italian film that works, that is not vulgar, crass, trivial, plotless or pretentiousthat is, with the message.

To tell the truth, it also has the message There’s still tomorrow. Moreover, already contained in the title which recalls Rossella O’Hara’s mantra. But in that participatory form that mixes comedy, melodrama, musicals, slapstick, dark circles and ragged clothes, Paola Cortellesi makes it arrive with grace and familiarity. Delaying and misleading between escape of love and duty, and throwing in half of classic Italian cinema. Because if looking ahead is crazy scary, you might as well take advantage the fundamentals of civil cinema that knew how to entertainand hurt.

To find new paths to narration, there is still tomorrow, precisely. Meanwhile, we live on nostalgia in black and whitea trend inaugurated in 2011 by The Artistand more vital than ever. The romantic comedy is dead Marvel is dead – if not in intensive carethe reservoir of stories is again and again twentieth-century humanism before any collapse (of the Berlin Wall, of privacy, of education, of ideologies, of the right in government).

Except that to make it work, this pre-postmodern humanism, in short, to touch on the giants Visconti, Scola, Rossellini of the 1940s and 1950s (and at the end of the 1930s filmed in the 1970s), you have to be good. Cortellesi is. One can reproach it for a certain schematic nature, the absence of some cuts, out of reverence, because it was the first work. But every fragment that describes Delia’s life – married to Ivano (Valerio Mastrandrea) who leads her and with a daughter to marry and two boys who ignore her – forms a sincere and original nucleus.

There’s still tomorrow: all the films mentioned by Paola Cortellesi

Beautiful by Luchino Visconti (1951)

Of the film with Anna Magnani mother of the girl he dreams of (and does everything) to guarantee a future in cinema, There’s still tomorrow recover the basement house. With the kids spying from the shutters, the walls eaten away by humidity, the furniture recovered. Like Maddalena Cecconi, then, Delia is an improvised nurse (but not only) who goes for home injections.

Unlike Maddalena, however, who spends all her husband’s money, she is more careful in managing money. Seventy years early, Delia is a kind of Gone turnL who accumulates money with a view to strategy, and this reassures the viewer. However, they remain two very different characters, that yes they touch still (it would seem) in an article of clothingblouse.

The one made by Delia with the polka dot fabric bought at the haberdashery in fact it has all the air of a tribute to one of those worn by Magnani (which however had a geometric pattern).

The Ciociara by Vittorio De Sica (1960)

The excerpt from the film Oscar for Best Actress to Sophia Loren it is the old love that is anything but buried. But difficult to revive, in any case present, with support: Giovanni and Nino. Played by Raf Vallone and Vinicio Marchioni. If Giovanni is a good grump of very few words, stunned by Cesira’s (Loren) beauty and still offended that she married a rich old man; Nino is sweet and almost submissive.

Both offer help. Giovanni promises to check the grocery store while Cesira and her daughter take refuge from the bombs in Ciociaria; he also manages to steal a moment of intimacy before Cesira and her daughter’s escape to Ciociaria. Nino, rejected by Delia who looks at him with enchanted eyes in favor of Ivano (the film, however, does not explain why), proposes to the woman to go with him to the north. They will make a new life; Meanwhile, in front of the workshop not even a kiss.

A particular day by Ettore Scola (1977)

It is the film that is cited most among those of inspiration to There is still Tomorrow. Yes, the scene of the clothes hanging on the terrace is just like the one seen in Scola’s film. Yes, Delia and Antonietta (Loren, again) are housewives exhausted by a husband (and children) all “you’re worthless and you’ve been alone in the house all day and this is dinner.” But apart from clothes and family, they have two different adventures.

Antonietta, wife of a fascist who accompanies her children to the big rally on the occasion of Hitler’s visit to Rome, is a simpleton who falls in love with her homosexual neighbor. Who enchants and embarrasses her with jokes and attentions, alone and desperate as he is, and one minute before committing suicide. Delia corrodes from the inside, he only has Marisa as a confidant (Emanuela Fanelli) who makes her laugh and encourages her, and cheers for her.

She is dejected like Antoinette, but in decisive moments she discovers herself resolute. For example, without knowing a word of English, she manages to ask an Allied soldier if he would kindly plant a bomb in her potential in-laws’ store. More than a partisan relay.

Paisa by Roberto Rossellini (1946)

This is where the repechage concerns Naplesan episode of the film which contains six and which is part of the story as the second film of Anti-fascist war trilogy. One of the pinnacles of neorealist cinema. Yonv JosephAfrican-American actor and musician with Italian domicile who plays the soldier William in There’s still tomorrow it is clearly modeled after Dots Johnson; in Paisa in turn in the role of the black soldier of the allied troops: Joe.

Their contacts change. William christens Delia «Hello, Devo-annà» (because he’s always in a hurry), gives her a bar of chocolate (a similar but choral scene, with the throwing of sweets from the tanks, was also there in The Ciociara) and then gives her that great pleasure of the explosive. Joe, half drunk, gets his shoes stolen by Pasqualea street urchin who listens to all his stories and then, seeing him asleep, takes off his boots.

Having found the boy among a group of homeless people, Joe turns around distraught, realizing that the boy has no family, who surely died in a bombing.

The Honorable Angelina by Luigi Zampa (1947)

Anna Magnani again. But with the film in which Nannarella is a commoner charismatic person who leads an illegal occupation of properties, and who the whole neighborhood would therefore like in Parliament, Delia-Cortellesi has little to do.

Angelina doesn’t stand distraught in line for pasta like Delia and the other unfortunates, attacks and empties the grocery store owner’s warehouse who says he has no stock. Mena and ends up in prison. And who knows what he would have done if he had known a soldier like William: undermine Montecitorio?

iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED