MARGHERITA BUY, ANTONIO ALBANESE IN DAYS AND CLOUDS

Degeneration of a lifestyle, regeneration of a marriage

In this study of work and marriage by Bread and Tulips director Silvio Soldini, a well-off Genovese couple face the dissolution of their marriage when their financial world crumbles. Right after Elsa (Margherita Buy) receives her degree in art history and is given a big surprise party attended by most of her friends to celebrate, Michele (Antonio Albanese), her husband, is forced to reveal that due to hard times and restructuring and his own stubbornness, he was pushed out of the firm he co-founded with Roberto (Alberto Giusta) and hasn't been working or receiving a salary for months. They're in debt. The first thing that happens is that Elsa is angry at Michele for not telling her. His judgment was that it was better not to worry her, but now that she has to know, it angers her to have been lied to.

One night the couple go out to dinner with friends and Michele insists on paying, even though the bill is $300. This angers Elsa too. Elsa also has difficulty talking to her best friend, Nadia (Carla Signoris). It's hard to confront people now that their status symbols are being removed.

Whether they're getting along or not, their beautiful apartment must be sold. Their maid, Daisy, must go to take a full time job, and they have to sell something to get her severance pay. Elsa has to give up her art restoration project, which was her passion but was not a salaried job, and find part-time work in telemarketing and in the evenings as a shipping company boss's secretary.

Michele gets desperate one day to do something, anything. He takes a day job through an employment office delivering packages on a motor bike--and his daughter Alice (Alba Rohrwacher) sees him. So she finds out. Alice has used the money her parents gave her for university to open a restaurant, and she works there. Michele doesn't approve of Ricky (Fabio Troiano), who Alice lives with; now Alice is torn between anger at Michele and serious concern for her parents.

Michele doesn't take what turns out to be the best offer he's likely to get, and winds up doing minor rehab work with two of his former employees, Vito (Giuseppe Battiston) and Luciano (Antonio Carlo Francini), who were let go by his firm before he was. Signor Salviati (Paolo Sassanelli), the shipping boss, has a weakness for Elsa. Roberto gets increasingly depressed when Vito and Luciano get hired back in the shipping industry and he can't do the rehab stuff alone. Now he doesn't even go to interviews.

The question the film subliminally asks is to what extent relationships, and peace of mind, may rest on a lifestyle--how much economic security changes everything. Now that Elsa and Michele's "days" are full of "clouds" and their nerves are on edge (and Elsa is exhausted from her new make-do jobs), they get into fights easily. It's not certain their marriage will survive. After a fight, Michele sleeps over one night with Ricky and Alice. He finds out Ricky's not so bad as he thought. Nor is it so bad that Alice is independent.

Elsa's restoration project, which we see her presenting during the opening credits, involves unearthing a fresco that may be the work of a painter she's intersted in. Toward the end of the film, she returns to the project and finds that her intuitions were correct. She's vindicated, her professor is admiring, and this becomes a metaphor for discovering a future. In the final scene, Elsa and Michele agree to forget the past and move forward as best they can.

While this starts with a premise like that of Laurent Cantet's Time Out of a man hiding that he's been pushed out of the corporate world, the development here is much more practical and everyday. The film succeeds because of a lack of tricky plot developments and the charisma and polish of Buy and Albanese. Soldini does a splendid job of evoking the upper middle class lifestyle the couple lives in Genoa. Events are nerve-wracking because they're living so much on the edge. This is probably a more common situation than it used to be. It's not very hard to identify with the couple and feel the day to day insecurity they suddenly live with. The security blanket is easily ripped. In a world of globalization and ever more rapacious capitalism, the upper bourgeoisie is yet another new proletariat, and Days and Clouds/Giorni e nuvole is a sympathetic portrayal of what that may mean.

Shown as part of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center June 2008, Days and Clouds has US distribution and opens in two theaters in New York July 11, 2008. (Reviews were good: Metacritic rating 69.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.