Three Goodbyes
The story, in its essential lines, follows Marta and Antonio as they separate after an apparently trivial quarrel. She responds with silence, her appetite disappears; he throws himself into work, unable to let her go. When Marta discovers that her lack of appetite is the tip of something deeper—a terminal illness—the film shifts register: from a sentimental drama, it becomes a meditation on the body, on death, and on desire.
The body is fragile, yet it is the only place where we truly live.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
A work of pain and estrangement: a dissonant song about the body, loss, and the time that remains. Loosely inspired by Michela Murgia’s latest book, the film treads a path halfway between idealized biography and symbolic narrative, oscillating between domestic realism and existential tension.
But Coixet does not aim solely for a linear narrative: the gesture of the “three bowls” takes on a ritual significance throughout the film. Those three bowls are not merely kitchen utensils, but symbols of measure, limit, and acceptance of the little that remains—a minimal act that becomes an act of resistance.
Visually, the film is supported by warm, intimate cinematography that transforms Rome into an island suspended between memory and anticipation. Coixet revisits themes dear to her—pain, weighty silences, the body demanding attention—but seeks to avoid melodramatic clichés.
Yet the journey is not without irregularities. The first part suffers from a certain rarity, as if the film lingers on everyday details without yet building the necessary internal tension. It is only with the revelation of the illness that the story gains depth, as if a break in the temporal flow allows space for what truly matters.
The performances balance intensity and risk: Rohrwacher, with her already familiar emotional register, brings a mix of fragility and determination to Marta, though at times she risks flattening. Germano, in contrast, offers a mask of confusion and regret that resonates with greater nuance. Less successful are the interactions with the Korean mannequin and with Marta’s philosopher colleague, who appears dramaturgically fragile and whose role remains uncertain. His conceptual quotations—particularly those on Feuerbach—feel forced and debatable, more ornamental than truly integrated into the narrative fabric.
From an existential perspective, Three Bowls questions what remains when all certainty falters. Illness emerges not merely as an external event to recount, but as a threshold that imposes a different perspective on life: taste, music, desire, and the body itself become ultimate witnesses to meaning.
The film embodies a gap between “existing” and “feeling”: Marta is not merely a “sufferer,” but someone who must relearn measure, taste, and time. In that gesture of regulation—the three bowls—one can read a tension between limit and openness, between what can be given and what must be let go.
However, the undertaking is ambitious and risky: transforming death into experience is always a subtle path, exposed to the danger of sentimentality. The film’s difficulty remains in finding a balance between existential depth and cinematic construction.
Three Bowls occupies that intermediate zone of cinema that attempts to reflect on life and dying without achieving the power of a truly transformative experience. The intention is clear: to combine everyday intimacy with symbolic tension, to transform food, the body, and silence into metaphors of resistance and finitude. Yet the film progresses unevenly, oscillating between the rigor of domestic chronicle and an excess of signs that often remain decorative.
There is a clear effort to pay respectful homage to Michela Murgia, but what arrives on screen is an object that exists mainly through intention and suggestion: the film remains suspended in an undefined limbo, a competent product that fails to leave a mark either emotionally or conceptually.
In this sense, Three Bowls appears as a transitional work: more a stylistic exercise than a true immersion in the radicality of its theme. Death and illness, as well as interrupted love and the need to begin again, emerge as evocative prompts but rarely translate into images capable of reshaping the viewer’s gaze. In the end, what remains is not the imprint of a necessary film, but the impression of a work that relies on the strength of its source material and the prestige of its performers, carving out a space devoid of the momentum capable of transforming the story into a memorable experience.
Illness is the silent teacher that forces us to measure the time that remains.
— Viktor Frankl