Bread & Tulips
Licia Maglietta plays Rosalba, a harried, unappreciated housewife who, while touring ancient ruins in the Italian countryside with her fatheaded husband and their two sons, ends up left behind at a rest stop, for which her husband blames her even though he failed to notice she was missing for a few hours. (He’s a real peach, the lone one-dimensional character in the film, but at least one used to good purpose as the plot’s main punching bag.) On a whim, she hitchhikes to Venice, a city she’s always wanted to visit but has never seen, and through another series of misfortunes ends up settling there, taking a part-time job, and rooming with an Icelandic waiter, Fernando (played by Bruno Ganz), who has to delay his plans to hang himself due to his unexpected houseguest.
The film marries two old movie tropes, the bored housewife making her escape and the stranger in a town of lovable eccentrics, in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. The script’s beauty is that it presents these various oddballs as they are, in favorable lighting but without commentary and often without much definition. Fernando’s neighbor, the “holistic masseuse” (and perhaps lady of the evening) Grazia, ends up in an intrigue involving the hapless plumber-turned-detective Constantino, who should be the story’s main antagonist as an extension of Rosalba’s husband but ends up winning our affection because of his determination and ineptitude.
Bread and Tulips is sweet yet seldom sentimental, and if it’s a little unrealistic at times, it’s more to avoid getting bogged down in the mundane details of a woman just taking off without much cash or means of support. There’s a fair amount of slapstick humor along with some good situational gags, such as Rosalba’s husband asking his mistress to iron a shirt or two for him, while Giuseppe Battiston handles the clownish role of Constantino in a way that engenders sympathy for him as even he tries to ruin Rosalba’s fantasy.
The only false notes in the film, to me, were the dream sequences, in part because they’re not set off from the film in any clear way, and in part because they felt like a clumsy method of demonstrating Rosalba’s own inner turmoil at her abandonment of her family obligations. Awake, she seldom shows any guilt, and relishes her freedom, her independence, her ability to put herself first and revisit long-dormant dreams, including an apparent passion for music that resurfaces when she finds a disused accordion in the wardrobe of the room she rents. The dreams seemed forced, as if the writer or director felt that we needed a reminder that she’d fled her family or that she at least loved her two sons.
Roger Ebert’s review of Bread and Tulips praised the film, but contains one line in the first paragraph that I found shocking to the point that I was slightly offended by it:
Not a classic beauty, not a ”movie star,” but a 40-ish dreamer who’s just a little overweight, with the kind of sexiness that makes you think of bread baking, clean sheets and that everything is going to be all right.
Man, I like Roger Ebert, but this is a seriously cracked view of beauty. Maglietti – who was around 45 when the film was made – looks gorgeous as soon as she gets to Venice and out of her frumpy-mummy clothes, spending most of the film in flattering sundresses that would certainly have exposed her as “a little overweight” if she had had any weight over. And I’m not even sure where to go with Ebert’s opinion on what’s sexy about an attractive 40-year-old woman (or about the type of women who bake bread?). Besides, if everything’s going to be all right, maybe you’re doing it all wrong.
What Ebert might have said was that Maglietti’s sex appeal is paired with a youthful visage that makes her seem more approachable, not just for the audience, but to lend credence to the idea that strangers in Venice would just take to this woman, offering her a place to rent, a part-time job, or help keeping her location a secret from her husband (who seems to want her back to take care of the house, not to be his wife or lover). Maglietti doesn’t look close to her age in this role, playing a woman in her late 30s with a cuteness that renders Rosalba’s personality as something even younger. She carries the film, with plenty of help from her supporting cast, in the kind of romantic comedy that would never be made by a major U.S. studio because it relies too much on tired tactics like strong writing and actors who bring their characters to life.