Sees All

THERE'S STILL TOMORROW offers an impressive showcase for the talents of Paola Cortellesi as both actress and director. This is a film that has flashes of true brilliance, which makes it all the more disappointing when it falls short of its ambitions. The story is set in Rome just after World War II, as the population is adjusting to peacetime, as well as to the realities of the 20th Century. The culture is not the same. Or is it? Since the days of Ancient Rome, men have been the absolute rulers of the family. (In Ancient Rome, men even had the right to kill spouses or offspring who disobeyed them.) There may be hints of coming female suffrage in mid-20th Century Italy, but such basic women's rights as divorce are still a long way off. Men are still all-powerful in the family; wife-beating is the established norm that everyone accepts. Ms. Cortellesi plays "Delia," a housewife in her mid-40s with an abusive husband, a domineering father-in-law, a teenage daughter who expects to marry soon, and two pubescent sons. Their social milieu is that borderline area between the lower middle class and the working poor. Delia holds multiple menial jobs in which she is paid less than her male co-workers, and has to hand over every dime she makes to her husband. (She does, however, manage to covertly squirrel way pennies at a time, in hopes of buying her daughter a decent bridal gown. Her husband says that the daughter can use the same one that she was married in, although it was worn-out even then.) The future holds only a small hope for a better life.

Photographed in black-and-white, Ms. Cortellesi directs in a style that is often reminiscent of Rossellini's early work, but there are some strange choices that fall outside the realistic context. As an example, the scenes of domestic violence are choreographed as an artsy tango, which softens the brutality. The meeting with the prospective in-laws is a little heavy-handed in its satire of the nouveau bourgeois. Some of the story is confusing, especially toward the end, which I cannot comment upon without spoilers. Let's just say that I was expecting one thing and then got something else that didn't make much sense. I was on track to rating this film as a 9, but with the disappointing ending, I'll have to give it a 6. But I still think Cortellesi is a force to be reckoned with, and I look forward to her future work. Warts-and-all, this is a movie well worth seeing and I do recommend it to anyone who loves Italy and Italian movies.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE is an oddball comedy that at first seems like something from the French "theatre of the absurd" of 100 years ago. One character is a tour guide in Winnipeg, a really dull town, especially in the dead of winter. It's fun to watch him try to make something interesting out of things like a dried-up fountain in the courtyard of a virtually deserted shopping mall, or a briefcase left at a bus stop in the 1970s. And there's the lady whose job is to promote the use of Kleenex. She goes to funerals giving out Kleenexes and encouraging people to cry. She herself collects her tears. In her closet, she has several jars of tears with labels on them indicating the years they were shed. There's a bingo parlor where the prizes are crates of Kleenex. Or the schoolboy who wants to be a comedian and goes around dressed and made up like Groucho Marx. And, of course, a turkey alleged to have won an avian beauty contest, who steals a boy's glasses. There are many other threads of the story that are all seemingly unrelated. I decided early on not to try to make sense of it and just see what happens next. I believe that that is the right strategy to take watching this movie. Amazingly it all comes together at the end to make a rather sweet and heartfelt story. It's in French and Farsi with English subtitles. Wisely clocking in at slightly less than an hour and a half, it's a delicate film with something to say about Love.

"Mickey" is an "expendable." That means that it is his job to get killed repeatedly for science. He gets killed in various ways and then his remains are autopsied and analyzed, with the results used for scientific research with the goal of colonizing planets deep in outer space. He is then "reprinted" and reanimated. But this time, there's a glitch and he is accidentally reprinted without having died. So now there's not only a Mickey 17, but a Mickey 18 as well. It is a crime to create multiples and both of them must die. But Mickey's survival instinct isn't about to let that happen. After seeing the trailer, I was expecting something delightfully fresh and original. I was disappointed on both counts. Has the sci-fi genre been completely exhausted? I wonder. MICKEY 17, as far as I can tell, has not one drop of originality. The plot appears to have been cobbled together out of old STAR TREK episodes and SUPERMAN comic books of the 1960s. The technology and special effects are all old-hat by now. With CGI virtually anything can be done. Special effects can't dazzle us anymore. Projectile vomiting and splattering blood-and-guts doesn't gross us out anymore. We've seen it a lot by now. On top of this there is an overlay of heavy-handed political satire that is also extremely predictable to anyone who's seen an episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in recent years. The jokes fall flat. At most, there's a mild chuckle now and then. The movie is all rather routine. The cast of fine actors who have all done good work in other films is wasted, especially Toni Colette. (When is she going to get another role worthy of her talents?) This movie is two-and-a quarter hours long, but seems much longer. I kept checking the time after half an hour. I can only recommend this movie to people who just want to kill some time.