Days and Clouds is a slice of life kind of film that follows a middle-aged couple into the economic abyss. The husband, Michele, has been ousted from the boat building company he helped to form by his erstwhile partners. Meantime his wife Elsa is completing an advanced degree in art history while working as a volunteer on the restoration of a fourteenth century fresco in their home city of Genoa. Michele doesn’t tell his wife of his dilemma until the morning after a big graduation party for her. We watch in dismay as things fall apart for them. Michele is unable to find another position, and at one point takes a job as a delivery boy and later forms a short-lived home improvement company. Elsa does a short stint as a telemarketer, and then becomes a secretary. They sell their house and boat and move into an apartment. Their relationship also suffers and Michele’s estrangement from his 20-year-old daughter Alice grows to the point that he strikes her. Finally Michele and Elsa split up, with Michele ending up staying with Alice and her boyfriend.
Things may take a turn for the better when Michele is invited by his daughter to take over her restaurant’s books. Elsa goes back to the church where the fresco she had helped to restore is being unveiled. She enjoys a celebration with her former colleagues and when everyone else has left she lays down on the floor to stare up at the fresco. In the meantime Michele has entered, walks over to where she is lying and wordlessly lies down next to her, also staring up at the fresco. The scene is filmed from above, so that it almost appears that the couple have become prototypical figures in an allegorical fresco themselves.
So the film may end on something of a hopeful note with hints that the family may be restored, as the fresco has been. But the film cuts close to the bone for most of us in the current economic downturn, and one can’t help but feel their spiral could easily become our own but for the grace of God. I was not much impressed with Antonio Albanese as Michele, but I thought Margherita Buy was poignant and convincing as Elsa; she has a very expressive face and uses it to great effect. The relationship with the daughter is irritating; Michele seems unable to be a room for five minutes without getting into a fight with her. Overall it’s a grim little drama for grim times.
Subtitle Alert: Persons speaking in foreign tongues.
