DRAMA; 1hr 58min (Italian with subtitles)
STARRING: Paola Cortellesi, Valerio Mastandrea
Wife beater: Cortellesi (background) and Mastandrea
Rome housewife Delia (a soulful Cortellesi, who also co-writes and directs) is resignation in perpetual motion. After her unspeakable husband Ivano (Mastandrea) greets her in the morning with a slap across the face, her day is drudgery all the way. When breakfast in the unhappy couple’s apartment is done — not that Delia has time to eat any — and Ivano and their three disagreeable children are out the door, her first chore is to tend to her handsy, bedridden father-in-law (Giorgio Colangeli). After that, she has a broken toilet to fix. Whee! The era is the late 1940s, cleanly rendered by first-time director Cortellesi and her cinematographer, Davide Leone, in an age-appropriate black-and-white that mirrors the unequivocal entrapment of its women.
As if Ivano were not punishment enough, Delia also juggles several jobs — mending underwear and umbrellas, injecting patients with meds and hefting other people’s laundry up flights of stairs. Then there’s the man she should have married (Vinicio Marchioni as Nino), who “got distracted” (que? ) 30 years ago and has regretted it ever since. Nino’s lapse is Delia’s torment: even when strangely played as a quasi dance sequence, Ivano’s abuse is relentless. Yet there’s a flame within Delia that burns through every squall. Her husband is a pig, their two young sons are hyper brats and their teenage daughter (Romana Maggiora Vergano as Marcella) is ashamed of her mother and emotionally withholding. Still, Delia keeps on keeping on, squirrelling portions of her pay for Marcella and enduring what she is unable to change. (Adding insult to injury, the entire neighbourhood is openly up in her business, as well.)
Surely this can’t be the end of her? Cortellesi isn’t racing to set any liberation records, and voluble Italian outbursts can only carry a kitchen sinker so far. But when Delia does finally seize her moment, with the urgency of the freedom fighter she reveals herself to be, its radical beauty is a bolt from the blue.
