Editor’s Note: Barrie
Pattison is singlehandedly covering the waterfront of the local Italian Film
Festival (and paying the inflated admission prices common to such events). You
can find his earlier reports if you click on the following film titles After the War, I Can Quit Whenever I Want to: Masterclass and Let Yourself Go
Director Luca Miniero and stars Claudio
Bisio & Angela Finocchiaro have done pretty well out of Benvenuti al
sud/Welcome to the South running to a sequel and a French version
with Danny Boon, so they decided to give the handle another turn. This time
it's Non c'è più religione/Messy Christmas where Bisio is the mayor of
the remote Mediterranean Island of Portobuillo to which he has returned after some kind of a failure in
Brussels.
They have a problem. The declining
population means that the youngest inhabitant is a chubby kid grown to the
point where he crushes the nativity pageant crib at the rehearsal. Without the
pageant the needed tourists won’t be interested and the place will decline even
further and nobody fancies the idea of the standard issue plastic baby Jesus.
So Bisio determines that he will recruit a baby from the adjacent community of
“crab eater” Muslims, over the objections of the church congregation he keeps
on interrupting.
Things get more complicated when he and
resident nun Finocchiaro have to deal with barely recognisable Alessandro
Gassman, with whom they used to be á trois (before Angela took her vows of
course). Alessandro is now a Muslim convert leading to a swathe of cultural
divergency jokes – (“don’t admire anything in their home or they will feel
obligated to give it to you”), the giraffe statue and his scratchy false beard.
The baby deal requires the islanders to observe Ramadan.
 |
| Non c'è più religione |
This is backed by attractive
Mediterranean scenery and a great comic cast. It sounds like lively and edgy
fun and for a while it is but they can’t keep up the momentum. The routines
become strained - simultaneous services in the shared church or the bishop, an
aged Roberto Herlitzka no less, desperately making excuses for the irregularities
in the Nativity scene are finally defeated when they ring in a Llama because
they can’t find an Ox. The Muslim kids, seeing his robes decide he’s Santa
Claus, foreshadowing the films nicest gag where they break out in “Santa Claus
is coming to Town” with belly dancer choreography.
The personal material is better with
Bisio, Finocchiaro and Gassman recalling their time together and Bisio’s teen
age daughter Laura Adriani leaving Muslim boy Mehdi Meskar who holds up a
farewell placard as her ferry pulls out. This all gets buried in the farcical
complications.
By the time we get to a Ganesh statue in
the dinghy, and the baby’s delivery, attention is wandering.
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