BREAD AND TULIPS A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2001 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): **
Mimmo Barletta (Antonio Catania) is hopelessly lost. With his wife off on something between an indefinite vacation and an ad hoc separation, he doesn't even have anyone to iron his shirts. His mistress ridicules his suggestion that she might do them since that is a wife's responsibilities.
In Silvio Soldini's sometimes cute but excessively long comedy BREAD AND TULIPS (PANE E TULIPANI), the story starts in an Italian tour bus. When the bus makes a rest stop, Mimmo's wife, Rosalba (Licia Maglietta), gets left behind. Mimmo and their son don't notice that she is missing. From there the story briefly becomes an Italian version of PLANE, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES as Rosalba tries without much luck to return home to join up with her family.
Turning her predicament into an opportunity, Rosalba, a middle-age housewife who reminds people that she used to work, decides to stay in Venice, a city that she has never visited but always wanted to. Carrying no credits cards -- which seems hard to believe -- and only a modest amount of cash, she is forced to get a job and to take a room in the small apartment of an Icelandic waiter she meets. With remoteness and melancholy, Bruno Ganz plays the waiter, who keeps a suicide rope in his bedroom.
Many quirky characters cross Rosalba's new path, but none is more intentionally humorous than Costantino (Giuseppe Battiston), an out-of-work plumber hired by her husband to track her down. This would-be gumshoe, who looks like John Candy playing Colombo, always wears a rumpled trench coat, a bright, mustard colored shirt, a frumpy hat and clip-on sunshades. He sneaks around the Venetian alleyways like a pudgy Pink Panther. These visuals of the awkward detective provide most of the story's limited humor.
The long last act, after Costantino finds his target, quickly runs completely out of gas, but it goes on and on. A big hit in its native Italy, BREAD AND TULIPS generates few laughs on this side of the Atlantic. I found it rather comparable to a typical television sitcom, which isn't exactly a glowing recommendation.
BREAD AND TULIPS runs a long 1:52. The film is in Italian with English subtitles. It is rated PG-13 for "brief language, some sensuality and drug references" and would be acceptable for kids around 8 and up.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, August 31, 2001. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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