I chose this Italian film festival film almost at random, based on the session time and the fact that it was black-and-white. It was absolutely delightful.

It is set just post World War II where Italy is on the brink of huge change. What we see is the atrocious status of women, through the eyes of Delia (director Paola Cortellesi) who married for love but her husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea) beats her for the smallest error. Her almost adult daughter Marcella (Romana Maggiora Vergano) is in love with Giulio (Francesco Centorame) who comes from a higher status family. His provenance is not perfect – there is plenty of gossip about how his cafe-owning father partnered with a collaborator – but Marcella is in love and it all seems hopeful.

Of course it’s not, and Delia begins to see the same patterns in Giulio that she saw in Ivano. She still harbours a love for a former flame who is about to go away and we see her squirrelling away money from the endless hours of manual drudgery that she undertakes and suspect that she is planning to flee.

It’s not quite that though and when you realise what is actually happening it will fill your heart. The black-and-white cinematography successfully locates us out of our current time. There are some really beautiful almost magic realism touches where music and dance are used to both parody and underline the awfulness of what we are saying. It is done sparingly but with great impact.

There is also clever use of music lyrics to underline the subtext that the characters can’t speak and even a little dabbling in some contemporary music toward the end. It is remarkable that it is Cortellesi’s directorial debut. It kept me totally engrossed and it felt like a really clever way to show inequity and the importance of change.