There's Still Tomorrow (2023)

There's Still Tomorrow opens in a black-and-white Rome of 1946, where Allied jeeps roll past courtyards and Delia, played by director Paola Cortellesi, absorbs her husband's fists with the practiced silence of a woman who has learned to schedule her bruises around the laundry. The film is a domestic-abuse drama dressed in neorealist pastiche, complete with musical numbers and a comic register that keeps threatening to wander off. It never does, quite. Cortellesi's camera holds on the ordinary, a walk, a meal, a beating treated as routine, and the effect is a slow accumulation of outrage that the picture is in no hurry to relieve.

At its center sits a sustained argument about patriarchy, and the argument is not subtle. Delia's father-in-law advises his son to moderate the violence so the victim does not grow numb, the neighbors watch and shrug, the daughter is being steered toward a husband cut from the same cloth. The wealthy Moretti family, whose fortune smells of wartime collaboration, supplies a class dimension, though the moneyed villains function mostly as scenery for the moral. William, an African American soldier, drifts through as friend and accomplice, a gesture at the wider postwar world that never develops into a thesis. Then comes the vote, and the film's real subject declares itself.

The final act addresses itself, with some insistence, to men, asking them to choose a side in a struggle the film has spent two hours illustrating. That directness is the point, and it is also the limitation. There is no room here for ambiguity, no interest in the interior life of the oppressor beyond his function. The picture recovers a genuine historical moment, the first Italian women's vote, and bends it toward a clean moral. What it does not do is leave us anything to chew on afterward. It has already done the chewing.