This reminded me of one of those beautifully photographed post-war Vittorio De Sica stories with Sophia Loren. This time, it's the long suffering "Delia" (Paola Cortellesi) who is marred to the brutish "Ivano" (Valerio Mastandrea) and lives with their three children and her ailing father-in-law. The love has long since departed their marriage, and a few fleeting conversations with struggling garage-owner "Nino" (Vinicio Marchioni) fills us in on a bit of her own romantic backstory before she met "Ivano". Their elder daughter "Marcella" (Romana Maggiora Verano) is sweet on "Giulio" (Francesco Centorame) who's the son of a local and rather pompous café owner and his wife. "Delia" suspects, though, that any marriage between the pair would merely end up mirroring her own so resorts to some quite ingenious Sicilian tactics before focusing on the one thing that might offer her some sense of individual fulfilment. With the brutality becoming ever more regular, we see a woman who is resorting to desperate measures - but what exactly is she trying to achieve? What's striking about this is the way the violence is portrayed. The kids are always removed from the room and then it's a dance. Almost as if it were being portrayed on stage - and it's entirely effective. Cortellesi directs this too, but avoids falling into that trap of losing objectivity with her impassioned storytelling. It's t…

Employing an alternative approach in making a statement can be quite a daunting challenge. That’s particularly true when it comes to using humor in conveying an otherwise-serious point. If anything is off kilter in that regard, the message can easily become mixed, obscured or largely lost. Such is the case, unfortunately, with actor-director Paola Cortellesi’s debut feature about women’s empowerment in post-war Italy, a somewhat confusing release that unsuccessfully seeks to fuse humor and drama in examining its subject. Set in Rome in 1946 not long after women acquired the right to vote, the film follows the predominantly dismal life of Delia Santucci (Cortellesi), a working class mother of three who juggles several odd jobs while struggling to cope with a bad marriage to a controlling, ever-suspicious, physically and verbally abusive husband, Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea). She wants a better life for herself, and there are many who sincerely encourage her to pursue it, including an old flame (Vinicio Marchioni); a kindly American MP (Yonv Joseph); a pair of sympathetic neighbors (Emanuela Fanelli, Raffaele Vannoli); her daughter, Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano), who’s on the verge of becoming engaged; and even her live-in, often-cantankerous, though not entirely unsympathetic father-in-law (Giorgio Colangeli). But, try as she might, Delia’s frequently derailed by events and h…

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