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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THERE’S STILL TOMORROW SHOWS WOMEN’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM  
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Stefanie Prezioso
June 4, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Paola Cortellesi’s film There’s Still Tomorrow offers a
striking portrayal of working-class women fighting gendered violence
in late 1940s Italy. _

Still from There's Still Tomorrow. , (Universal Pictures)

 

Delia dances, a disjointed puppet in the hands of her husband, Ivano.
He spins her around, throws her into the air, catches her, pulls her
by the hair, turns her over onto one of his arms, pitches her back
against the wall, slaps her, picks her up again, and strangles her.
Two bodies in motion repel, approach, and jostle with each other to
the stripped-down rhythm of “Nessuno” [Nobody], a song by Italian
singer Mina, famous in the 1960s. Only a bass line, that of the man,
sets the tone for the scene. The voice — the woman’s — seems to
be mimicking outright madness: “No one, I swear, no one, not even
fate, can separate us, because this love will shine with eternity,
eternity, eternity.”

It’s an unbearable scene, without screams or bloodshed. It’s a
sublimation of the cruelty that Delia endures and has to abstract
herself from on a daily basis. We see, in bodily rhythm, a mother’s
life pulsating against the beatings inflicted on her by her husband.
It does so “in a circular time, where bruises and wounds appear and
disappear, repeat, overlap, heal and bleed again, where violence
is not a single fact
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a Leitmotiv.”

_There’s Still Tomorrow_ by Paola Cortellesi — she is director,
female lead, and cowriter of the screenplay — has the effect of a
brutal slap in the face, the same one that hits Delia, the heroine she
plays, in the first minute of the movie. Filmed in black and white,
this cinematic gem plunges us into postwar Italy, a Rome still
occupied by Allied troops, but at an indefinite date until the final
scene (spoiler alert). The action takes place in the working-class
neighborhoods of the capital, where we follow the life of Delia,
mother of three children, two young boys and a teenage daughter named
Marcella. Cortellesi shows us with great sensitivity the living and
working conditions imposed on women. Delia takes on a series of jobs
(umbrella repairer, laundress, seamstress, domestic help) for which
she is underpaid “because she’s a woman,” while taking care of
the family household, her violent husband (played by an astonishing
Valerio Mastandrea), and his father with wandering hands, whom she
washes and feeds.

A nod to neorealism, the movie alternates between drama and comedy.
Music plays an essential role. Cortellesi delegates to song the irony
of the situation of women, imprisoned in an Italy emerging from war
and fascism, yearning for change. A longing embodied by the young
Marcella, for whose future Delia is ready to make any sacrifice, but
who is enraged by her mother’s submission: “I’d rather die than
end up like you,” she tells her. But it is also through music that
the director wants to make us aware of the continuity of the
oppression suffered by women in the peninsula and elsewhere, bringing
into a black-and-white film very contemporary sounds, those of Fabio
Concato, Lucio Dalla, or Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Cortellesi tells us about the discrimination suffered by women in a
patriarchal, sexist society where physical and verbal violence is a
ritual — accompanied by the injunction to remain silent in both
public and private. Delia symbolizes the gender segregation suffered
by the overwhelming majority of women in terms of pay, status, and
position in society, but also in terms of spatial organization,
including at the family table, where she is not welcome. Dispossessed
of her poor little basement apartment, Delia is also dispossessed of
her body (“When you leave,” Ivano tells his daughter, “there
won’t be a woman left in this house”). She is the prisoner of her
husband, a tyrannical janitor; her friend Marisa warns her that
he’ll end up killing her.

Crossing Streets Free of Violence

“The streets that women cross are streets free of violence”: the
slogan of the Italian feminist organization Non Una Di Meno (Not One
Less) seems echoed in Delia’s quick, confident stride as she crosses
the city each day on her way to her various jobs. From the seemingly
submissive woman in the family sphere, she becomes determined. She
defies her husband’s authority, notably by stopping at the garage of
her childhood sweetheart, a kind, shy man who is about to leave to
look for work in the North and who invites her with his eyes to
accompany him. But she also — above all — defies convention with
her best friend, Marisa, with whom she smokes, laughs, and drinks
coffee at the bar, sweetening it generously under the bartender’s
reproachful gaze.

Marisa, masterfully played by Emanuela Fanelli, is Delia’s closest
confidante. She is a strong woman who suffers the absence of children
in her life, which paradoxically puts her in a better position than
Delia. All the women who appear in this film are important, whatever
their role: from the laundresses to the neighbors with whom Delia’s
daughter sits as she waits for the latest violent scene in the family
home to end. But it is undoubtedly Marcella, played by a dazzling
Romana Maggiora Vergano, who is the key figure, the catalyst for
Delia’s emancipation. It is for her sake that Delia withholds part
of the money she earns from her husband, for the bright future she
wishes for her daughter, first and foremost within the framework
imposed by Italian society: a good marriage to the son of a petty
bourgeois family, owners of a café, enriched by their trade with the
Nazis during the bloody nine-month occupation of Rome.

Beyond Marcella’s anger at her mother, the director weaves the
mother-daughter bond through the glances they exchange: Marcella’s,
a mixture of fear, compassion, and despair, a haunting gaze in which
the violence suffered by her mother is imprinted, and Delia’s,
tender and harsh at times, but in which hovers the hope of a better
future for her daughter, in which she knows she must play a prime
role. Isn’t her own submissiveness setting the tone for Marcella to
do the same? Isn’t her own liberation the condition for her
daughter’s freedom?

Empowerment

Suddenly, a bang: the café of Marcella’s future in-laws burns down
under the watchful eyes of Delia and William, a young African American
GI who has seen the marks left on her body by Ivano’s blows. They
met by chance during her travails in Rome. Also an oppressed man, lost
in an eternal city whose language he doesn’t speak, William has lost
the only link to his distant family in the United States, a photo that
Delia discovers on the ground in the mud and returns to him. William
wants to help her get out of hell. Their various encounters unfold
like a dream, culminating in the surreal scene of the café explosion
to prevent Marcella’s marriage to the man who turns out to be a
variation of Ivano.

Delia rebels against the commandments of a patriarchal, sexist society
that is also preparing to crush her daughter. Cortellesi entrusts her
heroine’s empowerment to a letter, the first one she receives. Delia
reads it, hides it, crumples it up, throws it away, picks it up, reads
it again, loses it. . . a letter that the director makes us believe is
from the other man, the good man, the mechanic, her childhood
sweetheart. But wouldn’t it be rather limiting if that was all it
was?

In a whirlwind, the last minutes of the movie reveal the meaning of
this folded envelope — a ballot paper — and this story, a story of
struggle for emancipation. Not just Delia’s, but that of all the
women who came together in public for the first time on June 2, 1946,
to make their voices heard after twenty years of fascism. On that day,
Italy chose the Republic over the monarchy, which had collaborated
closely with Fascism. Not just any election, but a vote that reflected
the achievements of several years of armed resistance to fascism, in
which women had participated.

It would be wrong to think, as some critics have suggested, that
Cortellesi reduces women’s emancipation to the chance to cast a
vote. In fact, June 2, 1946, was the culmination of the victorious
struggle of a collective movement, to which the explosion of the
collaborators’ café also refers. It was a vote for social change
that paved the way for republican Italy and the writing of the most
progressive postwar constitution, which has been under constant attack
for over forty years by the forces currently in power in Italy.

To the tune of Daniele Silvestri’s “A bocca chiusa,” a choral
ending that thumbs its nose at the silence imposed on women, the final
scene resembles a women’s demonstration:

I’m singing today in the middle of the people / Because I believe or
maybe out of decency / That participation is freedom, of course / But
it’s also resistance . . . to that old idea that we’re all equal .
. . with just this tongue in my mouth and if you cut my tongue too, I
won’t stop and I’ll sing with my mouth closed . . . look how many
people know how to answer with their mouths closed too.

The power of this collective of women who decide to take part in the
vote and who sing “even” with their mouths closed stuns Ivano. It
links Delia’s individual fate to that of the women on the march, to
that of Marcella, who for the first time, full of recognition and
emotion, looks at her mother, whom she has liberated and who liberates
her in return.

In Italy, Cortellesi’s movie outsold not only _Barbie_ (released
at the same time), but also Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning _Life
is Beautiful_. This success proves, if proof were needed, that the
director has succeeded in speaking to a new generation of women and
men, in a country where a woman dies every four days at the hands of
her partner or ex-partner; a country that only legalized divorce in
1970 and abortion in 1978, a law that is trampled underfoot every day
by the refusal of entire gynecological departments across the
peninsula to enforce it; a country that only outlawed “honor
killings,” i.e., legal feminicide, in 1981 and only changed the
definition of rape in 1996 (until then, it had been associated with a
“crime against public morals”); a country recently condemned by
the European Court of Human Rights for gender stereotyping and sexual
violence; a country now ruled by right-wing parties that refused to
ratify the Istanbul Convention on gendered violence in the European
Parliament.

“To write women’s history is to fight against the great nocturnal
silence that always threatens to swallow them up,” wrote French
historian Michelle Perrot
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Cortellesi’s film is a particularly successful representation of
this ongoing struggle, in which nothing is ever taken for granted,
because there’s still tomorrow. Poetic, moving, political,
dreamlike, and surprising, this is a great modern fable not to be
missed.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in French
in _AOC_
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CONTRIBUTORS

Stefanie Prezioso is associate professor at Lausanne University and
author of numerous works on European anti-fascism.

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