Summary: Nino Manfredi gives a wonderfully comic and sensitive performance as Nino, an Italian working as a waiter in Switzerland. Absent three years from his wife and children--for whom he is theoretically raising money to join him in Swiss prosperity--Nino is a little like David Bowie's dispirited alien in "The Man Who Fell to Earth", an outsider too reinvented to return to his roots. Lonely, earthy, and clumsy among the polished locals, Nino has a series of Chaplinesque disasters that ultimately cost him his work permit and resident status. Instead of leaving the country, however, he sneaks back in and stays with a reclusive, beautiful woman (Anna Karina) with something of her own to hide. The adventures don't end there: like a modern Candide, Nino moves from one situation to the next, clinging to his optimism but also a strong suspicion he can never return home. Director Franco Brusati ("Forget Venice") has made a rare comedy here that is both light and tough at the same time, with a hero whose clownish trappings don't so much soften his anxieties as make him more sympathetic for suffering them. "--Tom Keogh"
Bread and Chocolate
(1973)
