Days and Clouds
Directed by Silvio Soldini
at Lincoln Plaza & Quad
No matter how noble its intentions may be, a hesitant ending is the worst kind of happy ending. This makes director/co-writer Silvio Soldini’s Days and Clouds the worst of the worst: It’s a 110-minute-long ending with no end in sight. Comprising a series of episodes in the life of a financially troubled, middle-aged, lower-upper-class couple, the story’s routine of emotional ups-and-downs are the couple’s one source of relief amidst their otherwise pathetic and all-too-real crisis.
But just because Michele (Antonio Albanese) and Elsa’s (Margherita Buy) plight is a common one does not mean it is necessarily sympathetic. Soldini manipulates their monetary dilemma so that it could not unfold any other way, revealing the artificial nature of his real-world drama. Two months after Michele loses his job as partner to the company that he co-founded, he musters up the courage to tell Elsa. This, however, is hours after she defends her dissertation. He didn’t tell her earlier for fear that she would be distracted from her studies, making it impossible to see it any way but his.
This kind of emotional dishonesty is indicative of the worst trend in the new wave of Italian neo-realism, where economic recession and familial malaise is reduced to cheap soap operatics with an allegorical twist. They transform serious socially relevant problems into trite domestic fairy tales. As a result, loaded scenarios are confused for sincere social probing and a protracted non-resolution is substituted for a real answer.
This comes as no surprise considering how Soldini, like so many other “New Neo-realists” willfully reduces his characters’ decisions to their responsibilities, ignoring one of the most the purely selfish but highly realistic motivators: personal desire. As in Eugenio Cappuccio’s One Out of Two or Gabriele Muccino’s The Last Kiss, workplace failure is symptomatic of a deep familial guilt that leads all career decisions back to one’s home life.
It’s misdirection of the highest order to think of agency primarily in terms of what one owes others. We’re not supposed to focus on how Michele feels he can pass up several job offers because they are beneath him, or that Elsa predictably has a fling with her boss at her new job. They won’t be resolved by film’s end because they are presented as transitory emotions. What we’re supposed to fixate on is the guilt and emotional strain that these decisions put on their respective familial roles as breadwinner and emotional core.
Family means everything, even in the cutthroat world of corporate backstabbing and downsizing. Roberto (Alberto Giusta), Michele’s former partner and good friend, explains to Elsa that Michele wasn’t fired just because he couldn’t do his job anymore but, more importantly, because Roberto can’t pay his family’s bills with Michele’s feeble ideas: “I have two families to support. Luisa, the boys, the house, Giovanna, Matteo, another house…” It’s a particularly hurtful betrayal because of Michele and Roberto’s friendship, as if personal ties were what really mattered when it comes to earning money for one’s family or (gasp) for oneself.
This domestic ideology reduces the home to a simplistic metaphor for personal well-being. The house becomes the nexus for all of Elsa and Michele’s financial and emotional problems. Michele needs to stop living in denial and live within his means, which means that his old house has to go. Before he and Elsa can settle into their new place, Luciano (Antionio Carlo Francini) and Vito (Giuseppe Battiston), must show him how to roll up his sleeves and take what work comes his way—by helping him move in and renovate his new apartment, of course.
There’s an inherent smack of elitism to that notion of the house as castle. It suggests that the truly unenviable aren’t the laborers that live hand-to-mouth but the businessmen that are wealthy enough to have had something expensive enough to lose. Michele’s blue-collar acquaintances are only useful to him for as long as they can help him get his house in order. The lesson of self-sufficiency they impart falls on deaf ears as Michele sinks back into a misleadingly expectant cycle of hope and despair. If his problems were really as dire as Soldini would have us believe, he wouldn’t be able to wait for gray skies to turn to blue.
Directed by Silvio Soldini
at Lincoln Plaza & Quad
No matter how noble its intentions may be, a hesitant ending is the worst kind of happy ending. This makes director/co-writer Silvio Soldini’s Days and Clouds the worst of the worst: It’s a 110-minute-long ending with no end in sight. Comprising a series of episodes in the life of a financially troubled, middle-aged, lower-upper-class couple, the story’s routine of emotional ups-and-downs are the couple’s one source of relief amidst their otherwise pathetic and all-too-real crisis.
But just because Michele (Antonio Albanese) and Elsa’s (Margherita Buy) plight is a common one does not mean it is necessarily sympathetic. Soldini manipulates their monetary dilemma so that it could not unfold any other way, revealing the artificial nature of his real-world drama. Two months after Michele loses his job as partner to the company that he co-founded, he musters up the courage to tell Elsa. This, however, is hours after she defends her dissertation. He didn’t tell her earlier for fear that she would be distracted from her studies, making it impossible to see it any way but his.
This kind of emotional dishonesty is indicative of the worst trend in the new wave of Italian neo-realism, where economic recession and familial malaise is reduced to cheap soap operatics with an allegorical twist. They transform serious socially relevant problems into trite domestic fairy tales. As a result, loaded scenarios are confused for sincere social probing and a protracted non-resolution is substituted for a real answer.
This comes as no surprise considering how Soldini, like so many other “New Neo-realists” willfully reduces his characters’ decisions to their responsibilities, ignoring one of the most the purely selfish but highly realistic motivators: personal desire. As in Eugenio Cappuccio’s One Out of Two or Gabriele Muccino’s The Last Kiss, workplace failure is symptomatic of a deep familial guilt that leads all career decisions back to one’s home life.
It’s misdirection of the highest order to think of agency primarily in terms of what one owes others. We’re not supposed to focus on how Michele feels he can pass up several job offers because they are beneath him, or that Elsa predictably has a fling with her boss at her new job. They won’t be resolved by film’s end because they are presented as transitory emotions. What we’re supposed to fixate on is the guilt and emotional strain that these decisions put on their respective familial roles as breadwinner and emotional core.
Family means everything, even in the cutthroat world of corporate backstabbing and downsizing. Roberto (Alberto Giusta), Michele’s former partner and good friend, explains to Elsa that Michele wasn’t fired just because he couldn’t do his job anymore but, more importantly, because Roberto can’t pay his family’s bills with Michele’s feeble ideas: “I have two families to support. Luisa, the boys, the house, Giovanna, Matteo, another house…” It’s a particularly hurtful betrayal because of Michele and Roberto’s friendship, as if personal ties were what really mattered when it comes to earning money for one’s family or (gasp) for oneself.
This domestic ideology reduces the home to a simplistic metaphor for personal well-being. The house becomes the nexus for all of Elsa and Michele’s financial and emotional problems. Michele needs to stop living in denial and live within his means, which means that his old house has to go. Before he and Elsa can settle into their new place, Luciano (Antionio Carlo Francini) and Vito (Giuseppe Battiston), must show him how to roll up his sleeves and take what work comes his way—by helping him move in and renovate his new apartment, of course.
There’s an inherent smack of elitism to that notion of the house as castle. It suggests that the truly unenviable aren’t the laborers that live hand-to-mouth but the businessmen that are wealthy enough to have had something expensive enough to lose. Michele’s blue-collar acquaintances are only useful to him for as long as they can help him get his house in order. The lesson of self-sufficiency they impart falls on deaf ears as Michele sinks back into a misleadingly expectant cycle of hope and despair. If his problems were really as dire as Soldini would have us believe, he wouldn’t be able to wait for gray skies to turn to blue.
