Director Isabel Coixet has been an indie stalwart for more than three decades now, first in her native Spain and then in the US and UK. Her speciality is romances that revolve around resilient female protagonists. Three Goodbyes is her first feature in Italian, an adaptation of a bestselling novel by Michela Murgia about a Roman schoolteacher named Marta (Alba Rohrwacher) who, as the film opens, is having a simmering argument with her long-time boyfriend, Antonio (Elio Germano), that boils over into meaningless enmity when she refuses to acknowledge his sense of angry entitlement. “I won’t have that conversation,” she says, exasperated by his insistence on points of contention that have absolutely no logical outcome. So he leaves her.
Coixet does an excellent job of showing the sudden feeling of emptiness in Marta’s life. Though a dedicated teacher who gets along well with her high school students and colleagues, she’s not a social person, and without Antonio around after 7 years together she succumbs to her resentment of his impulsiveness, sending nasty online reviews to the restaurant where he’s the owner-chef and living off junk food and too much wine. To us she looks tired and put out, but apparently her outward demeanor hasn’t altered significantly because when she meets with her sister, Elisa (Silvia D’Amico), a perky real estate agent with dreams of being an actor, she doesn’t let on that she and Antonio have broken up, and Elisa suspects nothing. This state of emotional entropy lasts for a while, punctuated by bouts of indigestion that eventually sends Marta to a gastroenterologist, who conducts some tests that bring back a diagnosis of stage four cancer.
Coixet doesn’t veer much from the usual cancer melodrama vector, but Marta is an unusual character. She despairs at first and then quickly recalibrates her priorities, determined to live for the moment and abandon what she recognizes as an existence based on self-pity (“I’ve always been ashamed of everything”). When Antonio, who has already realized the error of his selfish ways, hears that she’s ill, he reconnects but to no avail. Though she wants him back, she can’t stand the idea that his return is due to her condition and not a genuine change-of-heart. The final stretch is a study in what psychologists would call acceptance, and while such a development is also par for the cancer melodrama course, Coixet checks the sentiment and homes in on what can only be described as Marta’s peace of mind. It takes a terminal illness to convince her that she has value as a human being, a lesson we all should learn while there’s still time to appreciate it.
In Italian. Opens Nov. 13 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).
Three Goodbyes home page in Japanese
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