During the presentation of the film to the press, producer Riccardo Tozzi of Cattleya, director Isabel Coixet, screenwriter Enrico Audenino repeatedly reiterated how it initially seemed complicated to adapt the collection of short stories Tre Ciotole by Michela Murgia. The turning point was to go fishing the internal references between the various stories and make them chapters of the existence of the protagonists of the film, putting in the center a painful story of love in life and death. Three Bowls Monday 9 February 2026 is on Sky and NOW.
Marta and Antonio are the classic middle-bourgeois intellettualoide, she professor and former athlete, he chef of an uphill restaurant. One evening, after a banal quarrel, the distance that acute in time between their two worlds, explodes, leading Antonio to leave Marta. For the woman begins a period of pain, in which she must try to rediscover herself while the world around goes on. Emotional pain is transformed into a physique by accentuating Martha’s inappetence, until she discovers that pain is actually a tumor that is worn out from the inside. Martha’s disease will discover a unique freedom, which she did not have before. While everything is about to end, she will learn to live with herself and herself, choosing what to do, why do it and ignoring that fear of conventions that often keeps us.
In the background of the story there is an unpublished Rome, far from the classic postcards of the center, made of alleys and premises, shown by a Spanish director who at seventeen years had been fascinated by the dance of the flocks of birds on the city. Alba Rohrwacher and Elio Germano give form and substance to these two souls transported by events, who struggle to understand what love is at least until they have lost it.
The film Tre Ciotole invites us to rediscover the simplicity of life, that far from likes, social comments that also recur in the film, between the restaurant of Antonio and the activity of the B&B of Marta’s sister, interpreted by Silvia D’Amico. Elisa is Marta’s perfect fight. Elisa lives for appearance, hides under the search for perfection and likes, the pain for a life that has not been realized as she would have liked. Martha rejects the unclean continuous enthusiasm of her sister, although secretly she would like to be like her. The envy bonaria of those who have built a mask in time to isolate themselves from the outside world, to maintain their own balance but secretly dream of having that superficial explosiveness that the outside world seems to have.
The disease frees Marta from all these conventions, leads her to act, to embrace everything that could come, to throw the heart beyond the obstacle now that there is nothing left to lose. Martha opens up to the world and to a full, alive love, true that broadens the feeling beyond what social conventions have affixed to him. Friendly love, fraternal love, love of heart and heart, a feeling that is beyond flesh, visceral passion. Three Bowls is a movie to see with the heart, even before with the head, letting itself be transported in the dark of the room by the emotions of its protagonists.
The article Tre Ciotole, from Michela Murgia’s stories a powerful film on pain and love. Tonight on Sky comes from Dituttounpop.it.
