To Rome With Love
has about as much to do with Rome as
From Russia with Love had to do with Russia or Woody Allen’s previous film
Midnight in Paris had to do with Paris.
Nevertheless unlike
Midnight in Paris whose chief claim to fame lay in portraying stock characters from both the past
and present in a sit com setting,
To Rome
With Love is truly hilarious and inventive, particulary in two of its comic
premises. The first concerns a retired impresario with a fear of death (Allen
himself) who comes up with the out of the box idea of casting a singing
mortician (Fabio Armilliato) in
I Pagliacci. The only
problem is that the mortician, whose life’s work involves “in the box”
solutions, can only sing in a box, i.e. the shower. The ensuing opera house
scene literally places the mortician in a shower on stage, with a scrub brush
and soap running down his face, as he belts out his arias. But the
coup de grace of
To Rome is in casting Roberto Benigni as clerk who becomes suddenly
and inexplicably the prey of Roman paparazzi. Benigni is dropped almost as
quickly as he is discovered when the paparazzi alight upon an anonymous bus
driver. There are other strands of plot in the movie which include a
Michelangelo who falls in love with an American girl on her way to the Trevi
fountain and a Leonardo who falls for an aspiring American actress who likes to
quote Yeats and Camus. The movie is characterized by a number of these non-sequiturs that all ignite their own
individual brand of farce. Penelope Cruz plays a prostitute, who is mistaken
for the wife of proper young man from the provinces (and who in a wonderful
piece of Berlusconiana seems to know every Italian businessman in sight) while
the proper young man’s wife is swept off her feat by a famous Italian actor.
There’s a little bit of Fellini (
Nights of Cabiria, Amarcord and
81/2) in
To Rome and a big dose
of
Midsummer Night’s Dream as the chaos dissolves and Allen’s cast of
characters all land on their feet.
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