Bitte? Prego!

By John Skow

BREAD AND CHOCOLATE

Directed by Franco Brusati

Screenplay by Franco Brusati, laia Fiastri and Nino Manfredi

We are in a sunny Swiss park. Birds twitter. Seated on chairs in the grass, a string quartet plays Mozart. Well-dressed passers-by enjoy the sedate and placid scene. Along comes Nino, a waiter on his day off, a lover of music and birds, a man at peace with the world. He sits under a tree, takes a hero sandwich out of his pocket, unwraps it and--CHOMP!--the birds fall silent, the string quartet loses its place, and the passers-by glance about frowningly to see who made the horrid sound.

That is what it is Like to be an Italian Fremdarbeiter (foreign worker) in Switzerland, says Director Franco Brusati in this funny and rueful comedy. Obviously there are tensions between newcomer and old settler in any society--the mutual loathing of poor Mexican Americans and rich Anglos in Southern California comes to mind--but there is no denying that the misalliance of Swiss stuffiness and Italian disorder has a resonance all its own. Nino (amiably played by Nino Manfredi) tries to be fair-minded about the Swiss disdain. "We often can't stand each other, so imagine how foreigners feel," he explains to an Italian busboy who has been fistfighting to defend his national honor. Nino would like to take the next train home to his wife and children and to a society where his accent is the normal way of speech, not a laughable flaw.

There is no work in Italy, however. So Nino struggles humbly to fit into a culture that is patently superior (since its currency is sound), but the natural man keeps bursting out. He relieves himself against a wall just as a proper Swiss burgher clicks a photograph of his proper wife, and in the resulting fuss--such animals, these Italians--Nino loses his job.

A beautiful Greek refugee (Anna Karina) befriends him, but they drift apart. He dyes his hair blond and looks amazingly Nordic, yet he can't bring himself to cheer against the Italian soccer team. In fact he can't get the knack of feeling Swiss. He sinks to the ignominy of working as a chicken plucker with a gang of benighted fellow Italians who live in a chicken coop. Brusati likes to set up grotesque tab leaux to make his point, and in this goofy scene a group of tall, slim, impossibly blond Swiss youths and maidens come to bathe nude in a stream, as the short, squat, dark-haired Italians, smeared with feathers and chicken blood, peer out at them in wonder and longing through the wire of their coop. It is Italian servility that is being lampooned here, and not in the least gently. Bread and Chocolate does not reach this high level consistently--for at least half of its length it plays for any laughs it can get--but in the chicken-coop episode and one or two others, it is social satire as caustic as anything seen in a long time.

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