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Italian `Bread and Tulips’ a feast for the eyes, soul

The courtship of a runaway Italian housewife by a suicidal Icelandic waiter might not sound like the stuff of movie magic — even if it is set against the sensuous, super-romantic backdrop of Venice — but Silvio Soldini’s “Bread and Tulips” is one unlikely love story that can catch some hearts and chuckles.

It’s a funny, tender movie and so is its heroine: sweet-faced, late-30s Rosalba (Licia Maglietta), a hopelessly considerate wife and mother whose strange love odyssey begins when her philandering husband and diffident teenage sons accidentally leave her at a rest stop in the middle of their annual summer vacation bus tour.

Despite that anxious beginning, “Bread and Tulips” is a deliciously good-natured crowd-pleaser. And, though it’s hard to figure out exactly why it won nine Italian Oscars and a host of other international prizes, it’s easy to see why it captured the hearts of the Italian public and world film festival audiences.

There’s something immensely likable about the film: one of those earthy, compassionate Italian movie comedies that flourished since the postwar years and reached a peak in the work of Fellini, Nanni Moretti and Roberto Benigni.

Italian culture is one of the main themes of “Bread and Tulips” (“Pane e Tulipani”), a film whose very title harks back to such previous national movie landmarks as Franco Brusati’s 1978 “Bread and Chocolate,” the “Bread, Love and Dreams” series of the 1950s (starring Vittorio De Sica and Gina Lollobrigida), and, even farther back, to that notable Italian dissident epic novel, Ignazio Silone’s “Bread and Wine.”

At the center of the movie, and of its appeal, is Maglietta as Rosalba, a player of such warmth and empathy that she can carry us through almost all of Rosalba’s weird changes. There are quite a few.

Stung by her family’s desertion of her, she impulsively begins hitchhiking home without them; then, just as impulsively, she detours to Venice, a city always on her wish list. To the increasing consternation of her husband — crass plumbing fixtures executive Mimmo (Antonio Catania) — she decides to stay in Venice awhile, to take a “vacation” without telling him where she is.

As she stays longer, strays farther from her life back at her Adriatic home and falls deeper into her Venetian adventure with sad-eyed waiter Fernando (Bruno Ganz), Soldini seduces us for a while into accepting her behavior. She may be (temporarily, it seems) deserting her family. But, as we soon see, hadn’t they all deserted her emotionally long before they left her stranded at the bus stop?

Soldini is a humorist-social critic in the vein of Moretti (“Caro Diario”) or Ettore Scola (“Down and Dirty”), and he quickly sets up a comic conflict between modern commercialized go-go Italy, the world of vacuous hubby Mimmo, and the realm of old-fashioned love and humor Rosalba finds in Venice, with its dreamy, hazy nights and lazy, sunlit days.

What happens in the movie is often the result of mischance, whim or bad timing: Rosalba misses her bus because she’s stuck in the women’s restroom trying to retrieve her dropped wedding ring from a toilet, and Fernando was about to hang himself on the night Rosalba moves into his spare room. But it’s also one woman’s rebellion against the sterile miasma around her: the selfishness and hypocrisy of her druggie or indifferent sons as well as their cheating father. Though this anti-bourgeois viewpoint slants and skews the movie, it also puts a stinger in the comedy.

Soldini also has a gift for making people and landscapes come alive. His Venice is not necessarily the upper-class city of picturesque canals and decadent leisure we see in movies like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The Comfort of Strangers,” but a place with its everyday, warm, working-class side, its hustlers and scramblers, rebels and kooks.

Freed from her old life, Rosalba gravitates toward the eccentrics: Fernando, whom she meets her first night in Venice at a restaurant where the chef is missing; florist Fermo (Felice Andreasi), who hires her as an assistant; and neighbor Grazia (Marina Massironi), a dizzy holistic masseuse.

Oddballs gravitate toward her as well. When Mimmo hires a hapless, fat, detective story-loving plumber, Costantino (Giuseppe Battiston), to track down Rosalba and bring her home, Costantino ends up deserting his boss for Rosalba’s little community and for Grazia, who falls in love at first touch. Costantino is a classic movie clown, the amateur who wants to be a detective and goes about it with straight-faced, lunatic determination, embroiled in his own movie-fed fantasies.

A big doughy-shaped actor with the comical girth and gift of an Oliver Hardy or a Chris Farley, Battiston can project himself on screen as an innocent who is lost in a world that’s several beats ahead of him — and who is, like Rosalba, capable of a final, improbable revolt.

Can Rosalba really stay with her lover and her bizarre new world? Some audiences, I suspect, will become impatient with this runaway wife — and they’ll have a point. But Maglietta keeps pulling us in. An actress who has worked often and well with substantial modern Italian directors, both Soldini (in 1997’s “Le Acrobate”) and Mario Martone (1995’s “L’Amore Molest”), she’s a great straight man (or woman) for the rest of the eccentric cast, and she works especially well with Ganz, who conveys such soulfulness and bitterness as Fernando that he’s always able to keep the comedy from floating off into the ether of overcalculated whimsy.

Maglietta also has the delicate comic skill and intelligence to keep the film on keel, to forfeit some sympathy and still keep us interested. With her crinkly Anne Archer eyes, she helps us see Venice in a new way: not as some glorious relic but as a living, breathing — and sometimes even sleazy — city. Crazy as it may seem, she and Soldini make this trip a treat: savory as bread and pretty as tulips.

`Bread and Tulips’

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Directed by Silvio Soldini; written by Doriana Leondeff, Soldini; photographed by Luca Bigazzi; edited by Carlotta Cristiani; art direction by Paola Bizzarri; music by Giovanni Venosta; produced by Daniele Maggioni. A First look Pictures release; opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. Italian, subtitled. Running time: 1:44. MPAA rating: PG-13 (brief language, some sensuality and drug references).

Rosalba …………….. Licia Maglietta

Fernando ……………. Bruno Ganz

Costantino ………….. Giuseppe Battiston

Grazia ……………… Marina Massironi

Mimmo ………………. Antonio Catania

Fermo ………………. Felice Andreasi