The film based on the novel of the same name by Michela Murgia sees Alba Rohrwacher and Elio Germano who are a perfect couple!
A couple on a motorbike bickering at the end of an evening; then, passing by the supermarket to buy some biscuits, they take home three terracotta bowls, points collection reward.
From Roman traffic to the bedroom, they continue to accuse each other of divergent behaviors until he asks her for a pause for reflection.
A few days later, in a flat tone, Alba Rohrwacher has lunch with a more spontaneous Silvia D'Amico, telling her about having been left; we witness the classic dialogue on the relationship between sisters who do their best to be friends.
Their lives will continue for the two hours of the film amid everyday life, meetings, medical visits and anguish of this "beautiful accident" – as Marta says, the protagonist – which is life, while Marta uses the three bowls more and more often for her meals.
The film by director Isabel Coixet, it's melancholy, frustrating, a bit’ like the city where it is filmed, of which we see tourist districts, like Testaccio and Trastevere, as if to underline crowding, rush, superficiality and appearance.
Other times, instead, we see more intimate glimpses, like the icons of the Madonnas on the ancient walls, the roofs and terraces, in short, the Roman beauties. And we find the most genuine city in Roman cuisine, with traditional dishes, from the tongue to the boiled meat.
In the role of chef Elio Germano, in the figure of Marta's ex, he convinces and intrigues more than any other character, in representing the sentimental doubts and existential crises that permeate Michela Murgia's book, on which the film of the same name is based.
As naturally happens in a film adaptation, we move away from the book in which several stories are intertwined and, alas, the film does not have the same intensity as the Campiello Prize-winning writer who died prematurely.
The delicate soundtrack in which "Sant'allegria" in the version by Ornella Vanoni and Mahmood accompanies the splendid images of the eternal city is appreciable.
And you can barely feel the love for life in the couple's memories at Centrale Montemartini, or when cooking becomes attention and affection, or in tasting an ice cream or in the beauty of the Aurelian walls.
Yet all this is not enough.
Even though it is the photography of our contemporaneity, despite addressing universal topics such as illness or pregnancy, Three Bowls is a film that, at least in the first hour, it stays cold, distant, perhaps also because of the impenetrable protagonist who doesn't want to get help.
Paradoxically the last scene, so light and different from the rest of the film, it is the most engaging, well done, surprising, probably taking up the concept of hope from the Murgia stories.
Sabrina Sciabica