It’s hard to make a comedy out of a movie that starts with a husband slapping his wife just because, but it works.

There was a time, not that long ago actually, when action films didn’t dominate box office. Just look at the box office of 1990s (you can find it easily on Wikipedia) when movies like Ghost, Forrest Gump, Pretty Woman and Rain Man made huge amounts of money. Somehow we’ve lost this and now it’s only action and family movies with an outlier here and there (like the Barbenheimer). However, this domestic dark comedy (a genre which in itself is a hard sell) is somehow the 9th biggest movie in Italy of all time, making more money in the year of it’s release (2023) than either Barbie or Oppenheimer.

Delia is a housewife (of sorts) in the postwar Italy. She is expected to handle most of the domestic work and also hustle for money (which she apparently does in multiple jobs). Is anyone grateful? No. Instead her husband is violent and her daughter is contemptuous of her, her bedridden father-in-law berates her as she washes and feeds her, and she gets less money than a young man she works with even though she is training him for the job (the only explanation given to her being based on gender). Yet, she tries her best for the family.

In many ways, the movie feels like a neorealist movie from the period it’s depicting. It’s black and white, and gives you a pretty realistic idea of what life was like in that era. On the other hand, these are veteran actors, unlike the neorealist movies where they would often use amateurs. Also, the movie has moments where the style overrides the realistic feel. Like the domestic violence is softened by making it into a dance performance. Not that the movie is trying to make fun of it. It’s more it’s a necessity to make the movie feel at least a little hopeful and light, because despite the dark elements, in the end it is a comedy and it manages to become an empowering movie in the end.

In many ways, it is a sad movie. Delia has had to learn to cope with her situation. To her, the domestic violence is just a thing she has to cope with. Part of her everyday life. She wants to save her children from it, especially her daughter who is being married into becoming a housewife despite having ambitions. And that in itself is heartbreaking. There’s a scene in which Delia is being beaten again, this time for something she took the blame for from her daughter, and the there’s a scene in which the daughter just sits down with the other women from their community as she realizes what’s about to happen.

Now, I’m making all of this very dour, but the movie is much more than that. Delia has a network of people who do have her back. Sure, they are limited in their ability to help her daily life, but when she decides to take control of certain things, she is able to do so. Sure, there’s obstacles, but that’s what movies are.

I’m just not doing this justice. This would have easily made my top 10 of 2023. There’s great performances, the humor is very dry, but it’s just the kind I love where there’s these weird little jokes at moments that are supposed to be sad, and when the movie has an opportunity to be more stylized, it uses those opportunities to it’s advantage, but doesn’t milk them too much. I also love the use of anachronistic music in the film. You don’t expect OutKast to play when she finally decides to finally defy her husband. The finale of the movie is actually pretty small act of defiance and I don’t really want to explain it, because it is surprising, but at the same time, with the world slipping into fascism (and Italy having just gotten out of it in 1946), that one small act in the end has a lot of symbolic importance.

Recently I listened to a podcast where the guest was Jameela Jamil (who I know mostly from The Good Place, a show I should remember to finish at some point). The thing they were talking about was how much easier it is to control men than women. After all, you need to build all sorts of structures to keep women down when men just fall in line. There’s definitely truth to that. The French revolution began with women marching to the palace, and the first big strikes in England were by women.

Now, apparently this movie was based on the lives of the grandmother and great-grandmother of the director. Based on the age of the director, one would assume Delia is about the same age as her grandmother would have been and the daughter in the movie would have been about the same age as the director’s mother.

This is a great directorial debut as well by the star of the movie, Paola Cortellesi, who also co-wrote the movie. Often a combination that just doesn’t work out, but despite Madonna’s assertion back in the day that women can’t do this, apparently they can, because one of my other favorite movies from the past few years, The People’s Joker, did very much the same thing, although very differently. (Other women who have managed this successfully include Chantal Akerman, Barbara Loden, Miranda July, Julie Delpy, Anna Biller… The first two even made a movie featured in The Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll of 2022.)