Bread and chocolate
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Bread and chocolate |
| Original title | Pane e cioccolata |
| Country of production | Italy |
| original language | Italian |
| Publishing year | 1974 |
| length | 115 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Franco Brusati |
| script | Franco Brusati Nino Manfredi Iaia Fiastri |
| production |
Maurizio Lodi-Fé Turi Vasile |
| music | Pieces by Mozart , Haydn and Bizet , various songs |
| camera | Luciano Tovoli |
| cut | Mario Morra |
| occupation | |
| |
The Italian comedy bread and chocolate (original title: Pane e cioccolata ) from 1974 tells of the adversities of the life of an Italian guest worker in Switzerland. It is played by Nino Manfredi under the direction of Franco Brusati . The film and the leading actor received the Italian David di Donatello film award , and the work was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival . The New York film critics voted bread and chocolate as the best foreign language film in 1978 with a slight delay .
action
The Italian Nino came to Switzerland as a seasonal worker because of poor employment opportunities in his home country . He is not yet able to have his wife and children join them; his residence permit depends on whether he has an employment contract. He works as a waiter in a posh restaurant on Lake Murten . In doing so, he competes with an equally provisional Turk; the operator of the bar still reserves the right to decide which of the two he will employ permanently. She falls when the police come to him. Nino relieved himself of his need in public on a wall, and someone took a picture of him.
He turns to an Italian millionaire whom he served in the restaurant. This is a different kind of migrant and on the run from the Italian tax authorities. Since his wife betrays him and his children don't care about him, he feels loneliness and homesickness like Nino. He hires Nino as his new servant. However, the very first morning Nino served him breakfast, his empire was bankrupt. He's taken pills and is dying. Again Nino is on the street. He is temporarily staying with his former neighbor Elena, a Greek woman who has gone into exile with her son because of the colonels . Determined to return home, he goes to the train station, where a compatriot makes him an offer to work in the country. It is a chicken farm. The workers live in a makeshift barn that has been converted into housing and cackle as if they had gone mad. From there you have a view of a river point where the boss's children and their friends, all of whom are blond boys and girls, bathe. Nino dyes her hair blonde and is treated in a friendly and accommodating manner in the city. A football match of the Italian national team is broadcast in a bar. At the Azzurri's first goal, Nino was unable to suppress his cheers for long and was thrown out. Again he's standing at the station with his suitcase. Elena reaches him shortly before departure. Her future husband, a Swiss police officer, got him a residence permit. Nino is tired of the back and forth and leaves the disappointed Elena behind. There are other Italians in his train compartment, singing songs about home, sun and sea. But Nino realizes that he is completely fed up with it. When the train enters the Lötschberg tunnel, it pulls the emergency brake and runs back.
To the work
Bread and Chocolate is about the hope and despair of the migrants and the indifference and hostility of the locals they encounter. Brusati takes a satirical look at both nations. The Swiss are caricatured for their cleanliness and their sense of order and property, the Italians for their disruption and their inferiority complexes. The strong stylization begins with the fact that the Swiss speak High German among themselves instead of dialect (and are played by Italians). Nino feels a turmoil between an Italy that he doesn't want and a Switzerland that doesn't want him. The Italians seem pathetic, ugly and dirty to him, the Swiss beautiful, clean and rich. After watching a “nude bath of the blonde Siegfrieds and Valkyries of Swiss blood”, he wants to mingle with the “Nordic” population. Like most of the Commedia all'italiana films , bread and chocolate do not have a happy ending either: The last scene does not resolve Nino's conflict between two cultures.
The film grossed over 1,200 million lire in Italy, making it the eighth most successful domestic film of the year. According to the film service review of 1979, Brusati told stories in the style of American grotesques and relied on the play of its main actor. The film is "humorously packaged and yet with some bitter truth". Vermilye (1994) spoke in a book about the best Italian films of a "bittersweet drama" and a satire on class prejudice and cultural barriers. In his monograph on the Commedia all'italiana, Fournier Lanzoni praised the film as an appealing representation of loneliness and nostalgia. Brusati found a balance between different degrees of humor, namely the grotesque, a physical slapstick, and the art of survival.
Web links
- Bread and chocolate in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Rémi Fournier Lanzoni: Comedy Italian style . Continuum, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-8264-1822-7 , pp. 194-195.
- ↑ Fournier Lanzoni 2008, p. 196.
- ↑ a b film-dienst , No. 24/1979, drawn by "USE"
- ↑ Fournier Lanzoni 2008, p. 195.
- ↑ Fournier Lanzoni 2008, p. 32.
- ^ Rémi Fournier Lanzoni: Comedy Italian style . Continuum, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-8264-1822-7 , S: 255
- ↑ Carlo Celli, Marga Cottino-Jones: A new guide to Italian cinema . Palgrave, New York 2007, ISBN 978-1-4039-7560-7 , p. 175.
- ↑ Jerry Vermilye: Great Italian films . Carol Publishing Group, New York 1994. ISBN 0-8065-1480-9 , p. 219.
- ↑ Fournier Lanzoni 2008, pp. 195, 196.