‘Three Goodbyes’ Review: Alba Rohrwacher Finds New Ways of Living in Isabel Coixet’s Elegiac Drama

The three bowls that give Isabel Coixet’s Italian film its original title —rendered as the considerably less subtle Three Goodbyes in English— are three small ceramic vessels that the protagonist receives by redeeming supermarket loyalty points. They are there, without being particularly striking, but they serve the filmmaker —as they did the author of the original novel, Michela Murgia— as a kind of metaphor for the twists and turns in the life of her protagonist, a woman named Marta, played by Alba Rohrwacher.

The film begins with a breakup, the first of the goodbyes (or bowls) in this story. Marta is in a relationship with Antonio (Elio Germano), the owner of a restaurant, which comes to an abrupt end after an argument. He leaves and she is left devastated and alone, unable to connect with much of anything in her life and worrying both her sister (Silvia D’Amico) and Agostino (Spain’s Francesco Carril), her kind colleague at the school where they both teach. Things get worse when Marta loses her appetite, starts feeling unwell and goes to see a doctor.

Three Goodbyes is essentially about what happens after those symptoms appear, and about the ways in which Marta’s health problems will affect her future and the lives of those around her. For all its subtlety, its elegant mise-en-scène, enhanced by little touches of 16mm (or something that looks like it), and its refined score, the Roman-set film by the Catalan director of My Life Without Me and The Secret Life of Words is, at heart, made from the same materials as countless films about illness. The question, then, is whether its form can manage to sidestep some of the new age traps that tend to come with this kind of story.

Three Goodbyes follows a woman who gradually begins to see the difficulties brought on by her health condition as something resembling good news, a liberation from certain pressures and limitations that had previously defined her life. There is something of a bucket list mentality to the way she approaches life from that point on: a more compassionate and understanding attitude toward others and toward herself, along with a willingness to surrender to pleasures she had either never experienced or never quite known how to handle. The Coixet-Rohrwacher pairing makes the most of the elegiac quality the film takes on from there, even if they cannot entirely avoid the self-help aura surrounding the whole enterprise.

Films about illness tend to follow a more or less predetermined path dictated by the logic of health itself. And Three Goodbyes presents that trajectory as a kind of liberation: traveling to impossible places, eating the things one always avoids, speaking up in situations where one used to remain silent, giving in to sex, love and friendship. At times, the film manages to move forward without hammering home the “better late than never” philosophy that sustains it. At others, it becomes rather didactic, as if Marta’s fragile health has transformed her into a cross between a saint and an oracle, someone capable of pronouncing necessary truths and moving through the world with a halo permanently hovering around her.

Three Goodbyes circles around the clichés of the “illness movie,” sometimes elegantly avoiding them and at other times falling straight into them. Rohrwacher’s charm, along with that of the rest of the cast, and the little moments of “Eastern wisdom” revealed to the protagonist, help disguise some of the film’s more conventional observations. The same combination can be seen in the way Coixet films Rome, almost as if it were a cool version of a postcard. You won’t find here the sentimental scenes or pretty landscapes of so many hollow movies about people with fragile health, but rather a hipster version of that same format. Yes, the film manages to sidestep some of the traps of this kind of story. But not all of them.