Isabel Coixet: "Life has given me a few slaps in the face."

BarcelonaAfter a seemingly trivial argument, Antonio breaks up with Marta, who is soon after diagnosed with advanced cancer. The possibility of imminent death compels him to put aside romantic dramas and enjoy the small pleasures of everyday life. Based on Three bowls, the posthumous collection of stories byItalian writer Michela Murgia, and starring top Italian actors such as Alba Rohrwacher and Elio Germano, Three goodbyes It has a bittersweet luminosity that makes Isabel Coixet's first Italian film one of the most inspired by the Barcelona-born director, with an emotional serenity and touches of adult humor that lessen the darkness and seriousness of the subject.

Three goodbyes Is this a film you sought to make, or did it seek you out?

— It's a film that found me. I'd known an Italian producer, Riccardo Tocci, for years. He'd produced the Taviani brothers, Ermanno Olmi, and Mario Monicelli, and he always said he wanted to make a film with me and would send me projects. But I needed it to be something I'd fall in love with. And about two years ago, he told me he'd bought the rights to Michela Murgia's posthumous book, a collection of stories, some of them autobiographical. She'd died two weeks earlier. At first, I didn't see it as a possibility, because it was like going back to the subject of... My life without meBut he insisted, and when I read them I fell in love with two of the stories, which are the stories of Antonio and Marta, and I began to see that they could be intertwined to form a story.

And what did you find in Murgia's stories to address the theme of the imminent awareness of death in a different way? My life without me?

— A more mature perspective, no longer a fairy tale. She faces illness and death with serenity, even a touch of humor. Ultimately, it's a film that begins as a love story, continues as a tale of profound heartbreak, and ends as a love story. And I appreciate that the protagonist has a prickly, almost antisocial side, that she's childless, and that she combats loneliness through her portrayal of a K-pop singer.

How have you changed as a director in the 23 years that have passed since My life without me?

— I'm not the same person. I've learned things; life has given me a few slaps in the face. And I've also learned to approach things differently.

In this sense, more than a film about the management of death, Three goodbyes It is a film about life, and one of the most life-affirming films he has directed.

— It's strange, but it's true. Dying doesn't interest me much; death must be incredibly boring. What interests me is living, and living until the very end, until my last breath. Living in the present, because that's all we have.

Three goodbyes It contains the idea that, sometimes, people need to come into contact with death to become aware of the beauty of living.

— Sometimes this happens, but I think people learn very little. There are people who think they're going to die and suddenly become better people for a little while, but then they recover and go back to being the awful people they always were. Let's be realistic, let's not be Mr. Wonderful. But it's true that Marta learns. There's something she says toward the end of the film that's possibly a personal message from me to the viewer: "I wish I had learned to enjoy these things sooner, but you still have time." I say this to the viewer, but I also say it to myself.

Are you wondering what you would do in their circumstances?

— Yes, all the time, ever since I read the stories. And I've come to very few conclusions. I'd like to stop living anxious about the future and, sometimes, trapped in the past. It's very difficult to live in the present. And believe me, I try.

You leave space for each viewer to interpret whether the protagonist voluntarily ends her life.

— Euthanasia seems like a valid option to me when pain is involved. I've seen people suffer terribly from pain that was simply unstoppable. I can cope with existential anguish because I'm trained for it, but I'm incapable of dealing with pain, because pain transforms you into pain and illness. And when you are the illness, you're lost. There are also people who want to keep fighting until the end, and people who give up. What would I do? I swear I don't know. But if something happens to me, I'll let you know. I remember when I had a serious health problem and couldn't write.

You had a stroke, didn't you?

— Yes, I had no strength in my arms. But all I could think about was that I could still read and that I could garden, pulling weeds. It's like a compensatory exercise the brain performs. Like what happens to nearsighted people when they have a vitreous detachment, the eye gets used to it and it changes the way you see things. A friend of mine, Bob Pop, has an illness that has been paralyzing him, and yet I've never seen anyone with more will to live, more awake and lucid.

The film offers a critical look at the sister who makes a living renting apartments on Airbnb. As a director from Barcelona, ​​are you concerned about the gentrification of your city?

— Yes, especially living in Gràcia, a neighborhood that had been spared all this, but now it's also falling victim to an invasion that horrifies me. There's something fundamentally wrong with the tourist experience. Traveling is great, but being a tourist, standing in line for hours, paying exorbitant rents for dreadful apartments, and filling markets with people who won't let the woman who wants to buy her quarter of a chicken through... no. Rentals through platforms like Airbnb should be regulated because, on top of everything else, it all has a huge environmental impact.

There's also a lot of banter in the film about online reviews and ratings. And I wondered if you often check the ratings of your favorite movies on platforms like Letterboxd or FilmAffinity.

— The truth is, no. I only found out about Letterboxd at the Toronto Film Festival when someone told me the film had received excellent reviews. And I was like, "What?" But I understand the point of writing reviews for films or books. What I don't understand is people who write three-paragraph reviews of the patatas bravas at a bar, or about the pressure cooker they just bought. I find it incredibly strange.

In Three goodbyes Food once again plays a significant role, as is typical in your films. In fact, it helps to establish the character's identity better than his sparse dialogue.

— I suppose it's because I've reread Ludwig Feuerbach, the author of We are what we eat, whom I had read during university. I realized the extent to which I had used his theory to define my characters. Especially in The Secret Life of WordsWhen she begins to truly live, thanks to rediscovering the pleasure of eating. Now there's a kind of self-affirmation through what you eat and what you don't. There are even injections for not being hungry. But hunger is a part of oneself; hunger says a lot about you. Not being hungry is one of the symptoms of being ill. But it's curious that you mention this, because there are two people from two different universities writing theses on the role of food in Isabel Coixet's films. It seems a bit exaggerated to me, but that's the nature of academic life.

At the end of the film, the protagonist bids farewell to the viewer with a speech that rails against the "whys" and the search for meaning in things. Will you take it to heart?

— There are many things in life that don't have a reason, including life itself. And Marta says this, and I say it too. It's not from Michela Murgia, but something very personal to me. I used to spend my life asking myself why everything happened. I think my first one was because I was at the Texas cinema watching PinocchioI used to ask my parents, "But why does the whale eat Pinocchio?" And now I think there are things that need to be accepted without questioning the reasons too much.

After Three goodbyes You will premiere a new series on the Arte channel.

— Yes, it premieres on March 19th in France and Germany. It's an eight-part, half-hour series that I wrote and directed, starring three young French actors, Jeanne Balibar, and Tim Robbins.

It's your reunion with Robbins after The Secret Life of Words.

— Yes, it's a character I wrote for him, and he's quite like him, but he also has a lot of me in him. The title is Some devrait interdire the après-midi dimanches, that is to say, Someone should ban Sunday afternoonsAnd it's a kind of rewriting of my life. It's the story of a girl who wants to be a film director, and each episode corresponds to a film and filmmaker I admire, but it's a work of fiction. I spent my final year of university at the Sorbonne and had a very literary idea of ​​what my life would be like there, but it was a nightmare. And the series is how I would have liked that year and my beginnings in film to have been.