The woman's friends include Nino, a car mechanic who loves her; Marisa, a market greengrocer and witty optimist; and William, an African American soldier who wants to help her.

Delia's life is happily disrupted by Marcella's engagement to Giulio Moretti, the young scion of a well-to-do family who owe their prosperity to their local ice-cream parlor.

After a Sunday lunch Delia prepared for her future in-laws (and the bossy behaviour of Giulio) she realizes, that her daughter would be headed for a marriage similar to hers, with regular physical abuse and humiliation.

Marcella is devastated, but Delia knows she has done the right thing: she has decided to fight back in the face of her inferior condition thanks to the encouragement the arrival in the mail of her first voter's card represented.

On June 2, when the time comes to vote between the monarchy and the republic and to elect the Constituent Assembly, Delia wants to participate and looks for an excuse to escape her husband-master, but the sudden death of her father-in-law complicates her life as she sees her house filled with relatives and friends.

"[26] Boris Sollazzo of The Hollywood Reporter Roma appreciated the director's ability to take "shots, especially the more emphatic and paroxysmal ones, in a counterintuitive way, to emphasize normality, of a walk or a fight," while the cinematography and editing come across as "as abrupt as it should be, retracing an even visual language of the time, albeit with modern faces and some directorial solutions.

"[27] Alessandro De Simone of Ciak also wrote that the film sets itself on the comedy genre with a "courageous contamination between musical Italian neorealism and postmodernism" and "veering at one point almost toward giallo."

The journalist noted that although it does not turn out to be all balanced, the script "brings a higher cinematic level" to the project, appreciating "the comic timing and all the performances," especially by Emanuela Fanelli, Paola Tiziana Cruciani, and "the surprise, beautiful" Romana Maggiori Vergani.

Rizzitelli affirmed that Cortellesi "is showing them not a past time, but the mirror of what is still there today" by imposing in the film's finale "precisely on men, to decide which side they are on, determining, their position with respect to the struggles of feminism.

"[29] In a four out of five star review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that the film is a "storytelling with terrific confidence and panache", which "pays homage to early pictures by Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini" through "a piece of narrative sleight-of-hand that borders on magic-neorealism, performed with shameless theatrical flair and marvellously composed in luminous monochrome".

[30] Jonathan Romney of Financial Times described the film as "a thoughtful, emotionally satisfying, immensely entertaining one-off, with an ending that smartly dynamites our expectations", prizing Davide Leone cameraworks and Cortellesi direction which "pulls some clever, sometimes risky tricks, shifting between melodrama, farce and some uncomfortable heightened moments".

[31] In his review, Screen International critic Allan Hunter paired the film to the classic Italian neorealism cinema, and described it as "an unashamed, old-fashioned melodrama [which] develops into a more considered tale of small victories on the road to female empowerment.