Bread and Chocolate

• Nino Manfredi Nino
• Anna Karina: Elena
• Johnny Dorelli: millionaire
• Paolo Turco: Gianni
• Ugo D' Alessio: Old Man
• Tano Cimarosa: Giacomo
• Gianfranco Barra: The Turk
• Giorgio Cerioni: Police Inspector

The Italian comedy Bread and Chocolate ( Original Title: Pane e cioccolata ) from 1974 tells of the adversities of life of an Italian guest worker in Switzerland. He is played by Nino Manfredi, directed by Franco Brusati. Film and leading actor received the Italian Film Award David di Donatello, at the film festival in Berlin, there was the Silver Bear for the work. The New York Film Critics voted bread and chocolate with some delay in 1978 for the best foreign language film.

Action

Due to poor employment opportunities in his native Italian Nino has come as a seasonal worker in Switzerland. Wife and children, he can not be joined, his residence permit depends on an existing contract. He works as a waiter in a posh restaurant on Lake Murten. He is in competition with an equally provisionally employed Turks; the operator of the restaurant reserves the deciding whom he hires permanently from the two before. It falls when the police come to him. Nino has facilitated the public on a wall of his necessities, and someone photographed him there.

He turns to an Italian millionaire, he has served in the restaurant. This is an immigrant of a different kind and on the run from the Italian tax authorities. Then his wife betrays him and his children do not care about him, he feels the same loneliness and homesickness as Nino. It provides a Nino as his new servant. On the very first morning when Nino served him his breakfast, his empire is bankrupt. He has taken tablets and dies. Again Nino is on the road. He is temporarily with his former neighbor Elena, a Greek who has gone with her son because of the Colonels into exile. Decided to return it goes to the station, where he makes a compatriot for an offer of employment in the country. It is a chicken farm. The workers live in a makeshift dwelling purposes repurposed barn and clucking as if they were mistaken become. From there, they have a view of a river location at which bathe the children of the chiefs and their friends, all blonde young men and girls. Nino dyes his hair blonde and is friendly and accommodating in the city. In a bar, a football match of the Italian national team is transmitted. The first goal of the Azzuri Nino can not suppress his jubilation long, and it is thrown out. Again he stands with the suitcase at the station. Elena reached him shortly before departure. Her future husband, a Swiss policeman, got him a residence permit. Nino is the back-and- Hers tired and leaves the disappointed Elena back. In his train compartment other Italians, the songs of home, sun and sea are sing. But Nino is clear that he has completely satisfied. As the train pulls into the Lötschberg tunnel, he pulls the emergency brake and running back.

About the artwork

Bread and chocolate is about hope and desperation of migrants and of the indifference and hostility of the locals they encounter. Brusati takes a satirical look at both nations. The Swiss are caricatured in their cleanliness and her sense of order and property, the Italians for their destruction and their inferiority complexes. The strong stylization starts with the fact that the Swiss ( and be played by Italians ) with one another instead of High German dialect speaking. Nino feels a conflict between an Italy that he does not want, and Switzerland, which does not want him. The Italians seem to him miserable, ugly and dirty, the Swiss nice, clean and rich. After he has observed a " Nacktbad blonde Siegfriede and Valkyries Swiss Geblüts " he wants to mingle with the " Nordic " population. Like most films of the Commedia all'italiana, bread and chocolate is also not a cheery end: The last scene does not dissolve Ninos torn between two cultures.

The film played in Italy about 1,200 million lire and was the eight most successful domestic film of the year. According to the filmdienst criticism from 1979 Brusati tell in the style of American grotesques and put on the match of his protagonist. The film was " humorous and yet packed with some bitter truth." Vermilye (1994 ) said, in a book about the best Italian movies from a " bittersweet dramedy " and a satire on class prejudices and cultural barriers. In his monograph on the Commedia all'italiana Fournier Lanzoni praised the film as appealing presentation of loneliness and nostalgia. Brusati find balance between different gradations of humor, namely the grotesque, a physical slapstick, and the art of survival.