Pane e cioccolata (1974)

The popular Italian classic, Pane e cioccolata (Bread and Chocolate), is incredibly uneven. But it occasionally works as a weird, tragically farcical Odyssean tale of one Italian immigrant's misadventures in a cold, uncaring Switzerland.

Its gags are hit and miss, and its tone veers around a little wildly: in the opening ten minutes, we witness some social satire, some slapstick, and then a murdered child. It sounds strange, and, in the hands of a ballsy director like Lina Wertmuller, it might have worked as a sort of chaotic, provocative, politicized film. But director Franco Brusati is much tamer in comparison, and his aesthetics just feel sort of muddled and indistinct. Mostly, it just felt like a slightly maudlin proclamation for the inherent tragedy of immigrant lives. Yes, it's sad. But… huh? How are we supposed to feel about a ribald-turned-depressed drag show?


The immigrant.

Nino (Nino Manfredi) is a southern Italian immigrant making his way as a waiter in a posh Swiss restaurant. At night, he yearns for his family back in Italy - but his pride won't let him return, and his wallet won't let him bring them up to be Swissified (his ultimate wish).

The Swiss setting, meanwhile, is cold, uncaring, and fundamentally hypocritical: the lawns may be perfect, the etiquette air-tight, but there are dead kids in the bushes and stolen fish in the toilet bowl. Even the immigrant success stories - such as the ruthless millionaire who briefly employs Nino - end in embezzlement and suicide.

After getting fired from the restaurant, Nino faces trial after trial - and his problems just get more and more surreal. In a way, the film improves with this surreality, because that's when it makes its point most brazenly: for example, at one point, Nino ends up huddled in a chicken coop with a family of half-crazed, stunted, ignorant Italian immigrants. This madhouse increasingly appalls Nino until, exasperated, he says, "Look at us. You're Italian. I'm Italian. Does that mean we have anything in common?" The family shushes him and runs to the chicken wire window. "Look!" He joins them, and, all crouched and huddled together, the Italians watch through the chicken wire as a troup of young, naked, Aryan supermodels frolic through an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. The way this scene is directed - with lingering, objectifying shots of perfect blond hair glittering in the sunlight, and soft pink flesh - is just wonderful. It's scathing, hilarious, surreal and awful - very Lina Wertmuller! The next sequence, which opens with Nino having dyed his hair blond, is just as painful and wonderful. Indeed, the last twenty minutes of this film are uncharacteristically pitch perfect: it makes its point and hammers it home. Too bad the rest of the film wasn't like that!


Frolicking Aryans...


"Look how beautiful they are."

Our previously reviewed Café Express is indeed a spiritual sequel to this, covering much the same territory of Italian pessimism and decrepitude, embodied in the aging, tired Nino Manfredi and his sorrowful smiles. We don't know if we'd necessarily recommend these films, though, neither for their social point (which was better made by, for example, Wertmuller's Mimi metallurgico ferito nell'onore) nor for Nino Manfrediness (which is better enjoyed in C'eravamo tanto amati).

Café Express (1980)

Like a number of commedie all'italiana, Café Express is a tragedy dressed up as a comedy. Also, like other picaresque Neopolitan Odysseys (e.g. Mi manda Picone), dissembling, poverty and surreality factor heavily.

Michele Abagnano (Nino Manfredi) is an illegal coffee vendor riding the night train between Naples and Rome. With his broken shoe and wooden arm, he cuts a sorry figure. Though, since he's played by the charming Manfredi, he's also wonderfully lovable, always ready with a joke and sympathetic ear. The film ambles along, dropping in with Michele as he visits the various characters in the various cars. In this way, and the fact that it takes place overnight, the film resembles an episodic, nocturnal, ensemble piece like Jagte Raho or After Hours: that is, it mixes the strange with the immoral with the funny, all steamed up with some schmaltzy philosophizing on the nature of man.



With each car, Michele's story changes: in one, his wooden arm is a war wound, in another, an injury received as he saved children from a burning home. Even if he's a warm and gregarious presence, he's also evasive and, thus, mysterious. The only thing we know for sure is that he has a 14-year-old son, Cazzillo (a very cute Giovanni Piscopo), with a congenital heart defect - we know this for sure because we actually meet Cazzillo, as rascally as his father, when Michele finds him shaving in the train's bathroom. (Okay, that whole scene was adorable.)



Things take a very sour turn after Michele pisses off a small gang of thieves, and the film swings from a sentimental Italianate tragicomedy to an enraged screed against an unjust society. As well as a plea for magic(al) realism as a weapon against (Anglo-Saxon? oligarchic?) hegemonic notions of "reality"? Maybe. As Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, "So what I said was true. From a certain point of view." Similarly, Michele - and, to his horror, his son, Cazzillo - live by this creed of a malleable reality. It certainly feeds the stereotype of Neopolitans as knavish story-spinners, and it certainly makes for great surrealist cinema. What is the truth? We'll never know for sure. And, even if we did, would it change the tragedy (or funniness) of the situation?

Props to the final shot, with the self-posessed, urchiny Cazzillo making his way through a 1970s Rome, a little hawk in search of prey. That was fabulous. And props, as always, to lovely Nino Manfredi, our favorite interpreter of Romanness (even though, in this film, he's Neopolitan - and whoa! that accent!).


(Though Italian speakers can watch the movie here.)

In nome del papa re (1977)

In nome del papa re (In the name of the Pope-king, though it could also be In the name of the father-king) is a fraught, strange, charming film. It's also a breath of fresh air in its portrayal of the clergy - long stereotyped as corrupt pedophiles or one-dimensional bigots. Quite the contrary, In nome del papa re's worn, frazzled anti-hero, Monsignor Colombo (a wonderful, as always, Nino Manfredi), seems more like an ancestor to the partisan-priests of WW2 neorealism than anything else. His tangled, unfortunate position - as reluctant collaborator to a reactionary Papacy, as reluctant father to an arrested revolutionary - is wonderfully charged, tragic and bizarre. His mannerisms also - cigar-chewing, Roman-slanging - recall the tinted glasses, smoldering cigarette and whiskey tumblers of the old SNL character, Father Guido Sarducci. In other words, the PPCC loves him and would totally go all Catholic for him. "What do you want from me?" Colombo demands, impatient. "A benediction? Want me to give you a benediction? You'll have to make it last!"


In the name of the Father (and father)...


...and son...


...and the Holy Spirit (of revolutionary Italia!).

But enough of priests, let's get to the plot. The year is 1867, and Rome is in full-on Risorgimento-style turmoil. (For those that don't know, Italy was created in 1861. The period of unification is called the Risorgimento, and featured a lot of bloody conquering of the various kingdoms and principalities - principal among them, of course, being the Papacy and its repressive reign over Rome.) Bombs are falling, Italian revolutionaries are hiding in the houses of the sympathetic bourgeois or getting their heads chopped off, and Monsignor Colombo (Nino Manfredi) is drafting his resignation letter as a Papal judge. "I just want to be a priest," he laments. "Which is hard enough, as it is." In other words, the good monsignor's lost faith in the Papacy's legitimacy as a secular authority. He's basically a closet Garibaldista, even though he won't admit it to himself. (Garibaldi being the general who led the armies which unified Italy.)

Meanwhile, across town, three revolutionary youths - among them the stormy, arrogant Cesarino (Danilo Mattei) - have learned that they're to be arrested and beheaded by the Papacy, following a terrorist bomb they (or someone) left under a barracks (killing dozens of Vatican soldiers). Cesarino's mother, the well-to-do gentlelady, the Countess Flaminia (Carmen Scarpitta), despairs - and flies immediately to Monsignor Colombo's house. And there she lays the bomb (no pun intended) of the Bestest Plot Device Ever on him: "Now you have two reasons to save him. One, because he's my son. And, two, because he's also yours."

Ah, yes. Yes, back in those heady, halcyon days of 1849, amid musket fire and the clash of armies, when the Vatican's foundations first shook under Garibaldi's assault, as she tended the wounded and he administered last rites to the dying, and they were so tired, and all they needed was a warm bed, and so on and so forth. Okay, we actually found that whole idea very romantic. But then, disrobing priests while battles rage around us in Garibaldi-era Rome - mm mmm!


One of the most badass scenes: the mother of one of the other condemned revolutionaries confronts Colombo. "You saved your son. You didn't save mine." When he tries to give her the Holy Communion, she leans back, "No. Not from you." BAM! Go, lady!

Anyway. Monsignor Colombo is clearly in a bind now, and the schmaltzy music which forever hounds his brooding bluntly announces the heartbreaking choices he must make. HEARTBREAKING, in case that's not clear. VIOLINS MUST BE PLAYED. How will he get Cesarino out of the clink? When guillotines fall with such ease, and "there are spies everywhere", and Cesarino announces that there are two things he hates in this world: "Absent fathers, and priests!" What's a guy to do?

The film is most effective when it's not REALLY ALL CAPS BLUNT - and certain schmaltzy moments could have been lessened if only the music track had been changed. But we can't complain. We even loved the soap opery final plot twist, if only because the lovely Nino Manfredi underscored everything so well with his restrained, effective performance. Manfredi's schtick - as he did so well in C'eravamo tanto amati - is the easy-going, sarcastic, vulnerable Roman with a heart o' gold. He lays that down as his main melody, and basically improvises around it - in this performance, peppering Said Roman with telling moments of weariness, worry and grief. Never is he explicit in these things, everything is turned into a joke. It's like his protective exoskeleton. And, of course, that makes it all the more touching. An example: one of the most poignant scenes is when his servant, a grizzled, Obelix-ish Serafino (Carlo Bagno), comes downstairs at dawn to find him sleeping, collar askew, at his desk. As Colombo grumbles himself awake, clearly exhausted, he laments the night before: freeing Cesarino, but not the other two revolutionaries, and thus doing a pretty half-assed good deed. As he hunkers down to eat his breakfast, he sees bite marks in it. "Did you eat this?" Serafino is aghast: "You think I'm giving you my leftovers? It must be the rats in the kitchen, they must have got to the pantry by now and given it a nibble." And Manfredi just looks at him, looks at the biscuit, eats, and then sighs, "They're God's creatures." Ha! Okay, maybe you had to be there.


Ah, 1860s Rome! Is that Trastevere that my eye detects?


Don't legitimize a false authority!

What's interesting about this film - a tame example of a 1970s Italian film, despite all the sexytimes on and off screen, with and without priests - is how, yet again, political engagement is portrayed as complicated, messy and doomed. We saw this in Lina Wertmuller's incredible Love and Anarchy, a film which explored a would-be assassin of Mussolini in the days before the deed. Both films, which follow the "good" guys (pro-Unification priests, anti-Fascist anarchists), essentially end badly. It's very sad. And both films offer an apologetic coda, promising the good things that actually did occur to those movements post-movie timeline: i.e. the eventual unification of Italy and demise of Papal power; the eventual liberation of Italy by the Americans in 1945, and the death of Fascism. Which makes us wonder. Why are these films, both about real periods and real movements that "won", so pessimistic? Is it just commentary on extreme political activism per se? The inevitable fall of the zealous anarchist/partisan/Garibaldista? Hm.

C'eravamo tanto amati (1974)

This may be obvious to connoisseurs of Italian cinema, but C'eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much) is really great - who knew! We got it for Christmas, threw it into our Pile O' DVDs, found it months later (today), assumed it was some old school tearjerker and put it in - and what a surprise we got! This was fresh, quirky, self-deprecating, inventive, silly, sweet and intelligent. And many other descriptive words. We loved it!


Stefania Sandrelli and Vittorio Gassman dumping poor ol' Nino Manfredi. Don't worry, Nino, the PPCC will protect and love you.

We at the PPCC, for however much we like Italian films, are really philistines regarding them: we have little sense of history or significance, and only nominally recognize things like neorealismo. We just haven't watched enough Italian cinema critically to make the broad generalizations we're so comfortable making in our Hindi film reviews. But after a film like this one and the recently PPCCed La meglio gioventù, we can only say, Mamma mia, ancora! That's-a one-a SPICY MOVIE! We need-a some-a MORE, please! We want to learn more!

C'eravamo tanto amati - from our uneducated, dominantly Hollywood/Bollywood perspective - was fabulously bizarre. Breaks in the fourth wall, characters addressing the camera and communicating via "internal" spoken monologues, repeated scenes, and an irreverent sense of humor that doesn't even let the attempted suicide of one of the characters make things too grim. That's not to say this film doesn't have heart - it has a sweet, earnest vibe that forgives humans, warts and all, and highlights the ridiculous surreality of our self-made dramas.


"Should I take off my braces?" she asks. His reply: "Uhm... no."

Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman), and Nicola (Stefano Satta Flores) are old war buddies, former partigiani - AKA guerrilla fighters in the anti-Nazi resistance in Italy during World War II. After the war, during the notoriously hard times of the 1950s, they each struggle to get by. Antonio, an easygoing working class Roman, is a male nurse. One day, he meets and falls in love with the gorgeous, northern Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli). But as soon as he introduces Luciana to his debonair friend, Gianni, he loses her to him. Then she loses Gianni when the latter meanders away, inadvertently becoming trapped by a family of rich, former Fascist "padroni" (owners) and their well-meaning, ignorant daughter Elide (Giovanna Ralli). Once this happens, Luciana quickly moves onto the intellectual, self-aggrandizing Nicola. And so on.

For a film about heartbreak, economic strife and war, it's awfully upbeat. Antonio especially has a particularly self-deprecating wit, often summarizing difficult and complex tragedies with a single, dry Romanism. "Boh," he says at the film's conclusion.

"What does that mean?!" the over-articulate Nicola demands, fuming.

It just means - boh. Whatever. In the face of the ridiculousness of life, Antonio's response - a resigned shrug - seems to be the most sensible.

And the film itself is like one big Antonio too - teasing itself and the fashionable Italian cinema which preceded it. This film - which, according to a "citation needed" Wikipedia entry, is the most influential of the commedia all'italiana films - is indeed much more like the later, bizarre tragicomedies of Lina Wertmuller and Giancarlo Giannini. It feels like a conscious break from the dreary gloom of Italian movies from the 1950s and 1960s. There's a running joke throughout the film that only the self-important Nicola fully appreciates Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves), a film now renowned as being the Italian neorealist film (after La dolce vita, maybe). Speaking of La dolce vita, there's also a wonderfully bizarre and self-referential sequence when Antonio and Luciana stumble upon the filming of the famous Trevi Fountain scene (complete with great cameos by Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni). It's a film making fun of other films!


OMG, that looks familiar!


Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni playing themselves.

Apart from the fun, lively narrative, we also fell in love with the four principal characters - who were uniformly bumbling and ridiculous. Nino Manfredi was especially lovable as the kindhearted Antonio. There's a very sweet scene when Antonio bumps into Luciana many years after their initial break-up. He notices a little boy hovering around her and, becoming increasingly distracted by the boy and Luciana's hands twirling the boy's hat, he eventually stammers, "Wait, excuse me, is he... is he...?" She nods with a smile. Antonio extends his hand to the boy, "My name is Antonio. What's your name?"

"Luigi," the boy replies.

Antonio turns back to Luciana, voice wavering and eyes tearful, "You named him after my mother's uncle!"


Antonio and Luciana, the early days.


Oh yeah! Mike Bongiorno also makes a cameo, huzzah! We want to be the next Mike Bongiorno.

We can't really find any criticism for this film. We enjoyed every minute of it. This was right up our alley, and we were delighted and captivated. If you too like mildly weird and silly humanistic tragicomedies, this one's a real treat.