«Three bowls», the food that fills and empties the bodies

Michela Murgia is no longer with us, but she left us one last collection of inspiring stories Three bowlsthe new film by Isabel Coixet. And there is a lot of personal in what is told. Not so much about the story itself, a physical education teacher, grumpy, closed towards others, ultimately incapable of living, who after a few years is dumped by Antonio, the man with whom she lives precisely because of this musonitis of hers. Everything collapses around her, even his world falters, and the super-eight flashbacks tell the past moments well. But there is something else, an even more powerful ambush that has plotted his body: a fourth stage cancer, lethal. And this is the writer’s real experience. So instead of giving in to despair, Marta discovers life. First with Jirko, the hardback of a Korean kpop that he takes home and lives with and chats with. Then with food, the ex-partner is a chef, which before he swallowed badly, now little by little he rediscovers it, like those three bowls found in the supermarket and forgotten for some time. Man is what he eats, said Feuerbach and is reminded of this by Marta’s infatuated colleague whom she has always sweetly but firmly kept at a distance.

IT’S THE FOOD that fills and empties bodies, like bowls that fill and empty, like relationships between people that can fill and can empty, but you still have to live them, the rest doesn’t count. It is useless to look for explanations as ethologists do for the group flights of starlings, they say that perhaps it is a way to dissuade potential attackers, but what if they did it just because they like it?
Yes, Three bowls it’s a Kleenex film, which moves and moves, but then the story in its own way, if not exactly a hymn to the lightness of life, is at least an invitation to live without taking the things that happen to us, even the most irremediable ones, so terribly seriously. Ultimately, one of the most exciting moments of the film lies in the meeting with Antonio who has found out, and Marta who reacts, surprising him magnificently.

BIG PART credit goes to the two main performers. Alba Rohrwacher is a gigantic presence in a story that seems to have been designed precisely to rest on her shoulders and on that intensely bewildered face, that disheveled hair, that vomiting shuffle of hers not out of love in an apartment that always has visible glimpses through rooms and corridors before closing. His pedaling in a Rome so recognizable and so unusual is a gift. Elio Germano brings his bitter but positive smile next to her, from when he has to cook a tartare for a foolish customer to when he reads the cruel reviews that a resentful Marta initially sends him online. Then there are unpredictable but extremely functional musical choices, like that of Saint Allegria in the version by Ornella Vanoni and Mahmood or Tenco revisited, perhaps with the slightly too honeyed exception of the great Nina Simone in the finale. But we also accept that because Michela Murgia is still there..