In Three Bowls, Isabel Coixet brings Michela Murgia’s intimate and radical universe to the screen. Based on the novel of the same name by the Sardinian writer, the film tells the story of Marta (Alba Rohrwacher) and Antonio (Elio Germano), a couple who fall apart after what seems like an argument like many others – but which, in reality, is just the latest crack in something that has been going on for some time.
Marta tells her sister: Antonio moved away because what made him fall in love with her became, over time, what he could no longer bear. It is in that awareness, painful and impatient, that the film declares a very human truth: love, sometimes, does not end due to lack, but because someone stops recognizing themselves in the other. And then to accept it.
When Marta finds herself unable to eat, the symptom of a tumor becomes a metaphor: the body rejects what it no longer recognizes as its own. It is not so much the food that is expelled as the whole world. Hunger, in Three Bowls, does not ask for nourishment but for authenticity: it is the measure of the emptiness that opens up when you stop pretending.
Yet, right from that void Marta starts again. The three bowls in the title are those bought years earlier, almost by chance, in a supermarket together with Antonio. After the breakup, those bowls become what welcomes new nourishment: in them Marta celebrates her meals, she who had never cooked, before relying on his talent, a chef in a restaurant in Trastevere. Now each dish becomes a gesture of silent survival, a form of care never declared.
Coixet’s direction moves with modesty and proximity. The camera observes, accompanies Marta in the silences, in the bare rooms, in the small daily gestures that become a way of being in the world when words are not enough. It is a film that breathes above all in suspension, in the unsaid, in the slow time of awareness.
Marta does not seek compromises, much less ask for them. He doesn’t beg. She accepts her own “no”s – those she thinks protect her from the deception of superficial happiness – but also those she addresses to others, when she refuses to participate in forums to which she has never felt she belonged. His not-wanting-to-be-there becomes a different form of presence: that of someone who chooses the truth, even when it isolates. In that coherence there is his freedom, even if freedom costs everything. Happiness too.
Illuminating this path is the apparently ramshackle relationship with his sister, divided between love and disagreement, distance and recognition. It is she, in the end, who gives substance to Marta’s last wishes, organizing a party in her home: a collective and heartfelt farewell, where words become sharing, not mourning. On that occasion the phrase that the doctor had addressed to Marta echoes, when he informed her that the metastases had started to expand again. “Only one living being does not get sick, the amoeba. But the amoeba does not know that it is alive, it does not learn Korean.” A single line that encapsulates the meaning of the film: life, just like relationships, is valid to the extent that you feel, you are wrong, you desire.
Marta’s passion for Korea – language and elsewhere – becomes her ultimate horizon, and the medium of a particularly delicate and suspended bond with the philosophy professor (Francesco Carril), with whom she declares herself without saying it. In Marta’s house they kiss like those who know that time is short, and that sincerity, at least, won’t be.
Rome, with its warm lights, the flocks above Trastevere, the Tiber Island and the sunsets that touch the roofs, is the interior space of the film. It is here that Marta saves an advertising poster from the garbage and takes it home, making it her silent roommate, a shadowy companion who reminds her that one is never completely alone.
When Antonio returns to look for her to declare his love for her, telling her that everything else is ephemeral, this time it is she who leaves him.
Identity cannot be tamed, grace is not born from forgiveness but from recognition. Three Bowls is a film about pain, yes, but also about the possibility of staying in the truth without running away. It’s a story about love that ends and the person that remains — imperfect, fragile but whole.
In the finale, Marta faces the inevitable with a new calm: not that of resignation, but that which comes from knowing who you are. The three bowls of the title remain there, symbol of an emptiness that no longer scares. Because, perhaps, healing does not mean filling but learning to proceed, surviving the lack.
