Days and Clouds a Blisteringly Emotional Drama
Elsa (Margherita Buy) and Michele (Antonio Albanese) have a great life. Their loving, headstrong 20-year-old daughter Alice (Alba Rohrwacher) is co-owner of her own popular restaurant and between the two of them they’ve earned enough wealth over the years to allow Elsa to pursue her dream of studying art history.
Alba Rohrwacher and Giuseppe Battiston in Film Movement's Days and Clouds
Under the surface, however, things are not so wonderful. The day after his wife’s graduation, Michele reveals to her he has not worked in two full months, the company he founded 20 years prior firing him after he refused to go along with their new corporate-minded policies.
Soon the father’s relationship with his daughter begins to disintegrate as his ambition to find a new job evaporates in a sea of rejections. On top of that, after overcoming her initial shock and embarrassment over their new situation Elsa suddenly pours herself into finding ways to meet all of her and Michele’s financial obligations. But the distance between the two of them is growing, their marriage in serious danger of disintegrating into a nothingness even more depressing then middle-aged unemployment.
Silvio Soldini, the director behind such stunning dramas as Bread and Tulips, has crafted a wearingly uncompromising piece of work with his latest effort Days and Clouds. This is a hard movie, the pain and suffering being felt by its two main protagonists so unrelenting and harsh watching it can almost feel like a chore.
In short, this is not a film for the faint of heart. In many ways, the picture feels like a distant cousin to Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives or Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. While it doesn’t quite have the long-lasting complexity or resonance of those two marital strife classics, it is still so utterly absorbing and filled with such cataclysmic emotional crescendos I was, at times, completely blown away.
A great deal of the reason for this belongs to Buy. This is, without a doubt, one of the finest performances by an actress I’ve seen this year, nearly up to the same remarkable plateau as Kristin Scott Thomas’ work in I’ve Loved You So Long. The journey Elsa has to take is truly monumental, hitting so many peaks and valleys I was never able to figure out what the actress was going to do next. There is a world-weary winsomeness to her that is beautifully heartbreaking, and while some of the choices she ends up making nearly ripped my soul in two they felt so genuine I can’t help but think I’d might have done the same.
I wish I the film could have spent more time getting to know Michele. As good as Albanese is here (and he’s excellent) I just never felt for his character anywhere near as much as I did for his sideswiped wife. It doesn’t help that we only get to know him mid-crisis, so the fact he’s now nothing more than a shell of a once intellectually electric businessman isn’t exactly explained. But that doesn’t mean I liked him, and by the time he started shooting both himself and his marriage right in the center of the foot I knew the guy wasn't going to sit well with me one single solitary little bit.
Still, Days and Clouds is a firestorm of passion and pain that stayed with me hours after it was over. Soldini continues to tackle tough subject matter and does it with an expressive honesty that’s both impressive and exhilarating. His films ask a lot of their audiences, holds them accountable to keep up with all their nuances and subtle shifts in tone and mood, the man as gifted a dramatic filmmaker as probably any working in the medium today. For audiences looking for something more to sink their teeth into outside the usual Hollywood pabulum, this is one import worth seeking out.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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