I was drawn to this film, partly because the central character is a working-class woman in a post-war Italian city (my mother was living in poverty in Naples at the time), partly because I love the work of the post-war Italian neo-realism movement (this movie is a kind of homage to that style of filmmaking), Part comedy, part drama, part a feminist critique of gender roles and violence against women, it is a triumph that has become one of the highest-grossing films of all time in its home country of Italy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It borrows from the neo-realistic tradition by being set in Rome in the summer of 1946, by focusing on working-class characters struggling with poverty, and by being shot in black and white and partly on location in the Testaccio district of the capital. But it is a modern take of the neo-realistic movement with elements of fantasy and the alignment of images with the words of songs (not all contemporary). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The outstanding success of the film owes so much to Paola Cortellisi who is known in Italy as a singer and as an actor and comedian, mainly on television. Here she is the director (first time), co-writer and leading actor, playing Delia who earns bits of money from a variety of menial jobs, does all the cooking and cleaning at home, and contrives to look after an abusive husband, three children and an aging father-in-law. By the end of the film, you’ll be in love with Delia, achingly wanting her happiness, but very unsure how she is likely to find it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was drawn to this film, partly because the central character is a working-class woman in a post-war Italian city (my mother was living in poverty in Naples at the time), partly because I love the work of the post-war Italian neo-realism movement (this movie is a kind of homage to that style of filmmaking), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29242"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29246,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29242\/revisions\/29246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}