Film

Woman Without Piano

A Spanish film about a Madrid housewife who leaves her marriage without a plan, just desperate hope for something more. It's funny without being cute, melancholic without wallowing—a portrait of smallness and yearning that finds grace in bureaucracy and failed attempts at reinvention. For anyone who's felt trapped by routine.

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy deadpan, slightly absurd comedy about small domestic rebellions, where a lead's restless inner life matters more than plot mechanics and the jokes come from waiting rooms and paperwork.

Skip it if you need brisk plotting or a clear goal, since its heroine drifts with no real plan and long stretches simply follow her through the city's offices.

What it asks of you: Its shape is short and loose, a ninety-odd minute ramble with mostly flat rhythms, so patience with repetition pays off more than sharp plotting does.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

A Separation2011

A marriage fractured by competing needs and kindnesses, told with surgical precision and surprising humour. Asghar Farhadi finds the full humanity in ordinary domestic collapse, which is exactly what this film does too.

But Emotionally wearying rather than cathartic. You don't leave feeling healed, just understood—and sometimes that's harder to sit with.

A Separation poster

Autumn Spring2001

A Czech widower navigates small acts of autonomy and joy after decades of routine. It has the same tender, unsentimental eye for quotidian bravery, the same gentle absurdist humour about aging and escape.

But Very quiet. Nothing much happens plot-wise, and if you're after incident rather than mood, you'll find it thin.

Autumn Spring poster

The Taste of Things2023

A French chef and his widowed housewife maintain a relationship outside marriage—passionate, tender, and lived in the spaces between social expectation. Beautiful filmmaking about people finding life on their own terms.

But Paced for patient viewers. It unfolds like a slow meal, and if you want quicker momentum, you'll fight its rhythm.

The Taste of Things poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Woman Without Piano

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Still Life2006

Both films treat routine and absence as their subject matter, not as backdrop. Both find poetry in people moving through bureaucratic spaces with quiet desperation and grace.

Jia Zhangke's masterpiece about an unnamed man searching Beijing's urban rubble for someone from his past—a film that transforms the mundane into metaphysics. Like Woman Without Piano, it finds the sacred in the forgotten and displaced.

But Nearly three hours of deadpan observation. If you need clear narrative or emotional peaks, this will test your patience severely.

Still Life poster
More like this (7)

Bread and Roses2000

Women cleaners in LA organize for dignity, and Ken Loach captures both their rage and their humour with rare balance. It's about invisible labour and invisible people trying to be seen—Rosa's exact predicament.

But Politically direct in a way that can feel preachy if you're not with it from the start. No ambiguity about whose side the film is on.

Bread and Roses poster

I've Loved You So Long2008

Kristin Scott Thomas as a woman reintroducing herself to the world after prison, learning how to exist among people again. Both films watch someone try to become real after a long erasure, with the same observant tenderness.

But Darker backstory than this film's tone might suggest. The secret at the centre is heavier than the gentle surface.

I've Loved You So Long poster

Happy as Lazzaro2018

An Italian parable about goodness and strangeness, with the same comic-tragic eye for ordinary cruelty and how people survive it. Not plot-driven; character and atmosphere are everything.

But Whimsical in ways some will find precious. It plays by its own rules, and if you prefer realism, you'll find it mannered.

Happy as Lazzaro poster

The Worst Person in the World2021

A woman in her twenties cycles through versions of herself, trying to want the right things. It shares this film's wry understanding that self-discovery isn't inspiring—it's messy, funny, and mostly private.

But Much sleeker and more contemporary than this film. If you want something rougher or less styled, this leans into artifice.

The Worst Person in the World poster

Julia2008

An older woman wakes up after a lifetime of passivity and sees her complicity in harm. Slow and uneasy, it asks hard questions about how we live and what we owe. Rosa's quiet reckoning has similar weight.

But Bleak and uncomfortable. There's no redemption arc, just acknowledgment, and that can feel punishing rather than cathartic.

Julia poster

The Decline of the American Empire1986

Both centre on characters who refuse the consolations of their assigned life, and both are amused by how little we actually know about escape or reinvention.

Denys Arcand's brilliant film about a man and woman (once lovers, now estranged) navigating middle age, regret, and the gap between who we wanted to be and who we are. Comic, philosophical, devastatingly honest about desire and disappointment.

But Entirely dialogue-driven—a long conversation. If you want cinema of images, not ideas, this is philosophy as talk.

The Decline of the American Empire poster

The Gleaners and I2000

Rosa is a gleaner of sorts, collecting scraps of a different life from the margins of her routine. Varda's film sees beauty and dignity in that act the way this one does, without sentimentality.

Agnès Varda's documentary about people who collect the discarded—fruit from fields, food from bins, copper wire from waste heaps. A meditation on invisibility, resourcefulness, and how entire lives happen in the margins society ignores.

But A documentary, not a fiction film. And it's essayistic—Varda thinks on camera, digresses, follows her eye rather than a throughline.

The Gleaners and I poster

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