A reawakening from tragedy ...
In this film, we start off thinking we already know Mrs. Delahunty, a proper Englishwoman headed off on a shopping trip in Milan. But we soon find not all is as it seems. An early clue: she has more than one name, just as she has more than one outfit to wear. As the film progresses, we think it's about the survivors of a horrific terrorist attack bonding together. We instead learn how badly damaged Mrs. Delahunty is from her youth being raised with “people who are not her parents” and how she fears for a similar path being laid out for the young girl orphaned in the attack.
Mrs. Delahunty copes with her own traumas by creating alternate lives in her romance novels. Somewhat bizarrely, the fantasies creep into her real life. She narrates her life with a detachment to reality. She is aging, her life, a far cry from-romantic "bodice-busting" romance novels she writes. And yet, she still interprets herself as a much-younger, sexy heroine.
The terrorist attack breaks a dry spell she’d been having in her writing. As she bonds and convalesces with her fellow survivors, they come to represent parts of her past. The elderly English general represents her English youth. Aimee, the orphaned child who was to be handed over to the loveless/lifeless academic uncle represents herself as a child, sold to "people who were not her parents." And, Werner, who wasn't at all what he seemed, the questionable past that Emily "re-interpretsd" in her fictional stories of her life. Her drinking and smoking seemed to accelerate as she came to terms with the parallels of her fellow survivors and her life.
It's hard to imagine how other reviewers found this film boring. There were many undercurrents and puzzles to keep the viewer processing what was being seen.