Sunday,
March 02,
"Bianco e Nero" Italian Film re
Interracial Love Is Surprise Success
The
ANNOTICO Report
Bianco
e Nero
(White and Black), is directed by Cristina Comencini.
and has grossed #3m in six weeks - a hefty return for
an Italian film.
The
plot: Carlo works for a Rome-based charity, and Nadine, works for the
Senegalese embassy. They meet and fall in love and leave their
respective spouses, to a backdrop of family and friends all counseling against
'mixed marriage'.
The last count of
marriages in Italy by ethnicity showed about 30,000 weddings in 2004 involved a
bride and groom of different races, nearly one in 10 of all marriages in
"supposedly" racist Italy and triple the figure for 1992.
In
real life, at the Bar Max in
Amid the
anti-immigrant electoral rhetoric, a film on mixed marriages and sex is a
surprise success
The Observer,
Ed Vulliamy in
Sunday March 2 2008
When legal
immigration quadruples over 15 years and reaches 3.7 million, as it has in
This is the
theme, poking fun at the wider nightmare of racism, of a film that has found a
sudden and unexpected success in
Bianco e
Nero
(White and Black), directed by Cristina Comencini,
is about a liberal couple, Carlo and Elena. Elena, the daughter of a rabid
racist, works for a Rome-based charity. Among her colleagues is Bertrand from
It should be a
fairly inconsequential film, mocking not only racism
but also what the Italians call buonismo - the
political correctness of people like Elena. But it has been anything but
inconsequential. Bianco e Nero has grossed #3m in six weeks - a hefty return
for an Italian film. It has generated debate well beyond its remit, academics
using the opportunity to point out the lack of black faces on Italian TV or in
Italian films.
Political
columnists, however, say there are not enough black victims in the film,
assailing it for treating the curse of racism with lightness of touch. The
critics are left as amused as they are bemused, La Repubblica
finding it 'difficult to reconcile the film's light tone with its didactic
purpose', but in another article noting how Carlo was unable to resist a 'bit
of exotic beauty'. A bold article in Corriere della
Sera broaches an issue it calls 'the desire for the other skin'.
'It was not an
easy script', says Comencini. 'Everywhere there was
the likelihood of touching some prejudice or other. Paradoxically the
Italians seem less guilty and angst-ridden, whereas in other cultures it
might have been more difficult for a white director to make a film about
blacks.'
The fact is
that the entwinement between sex and race, and the racism of that 'exotic
beauty', is overt in
On Friday, at the
English pub next to
Racism and organised fascism is endemic in
It was in Brescia
that a Pakistani, Sali Saleem,
on finding out that his daughter Hina was dating a
carpenter called Beppe Tampini,
slit her throat, yet was cleared of murder by the highest court in Italy
because, the judges ruled, he was obeying an ethno-religious custom.
The last count of
marriages by ethnicity showed about 30,000 weddings in 2004 involved a bride
and groom of different races, nearly one in 10 of all marriages in
"supposedly" racist Italy and triple the figure for 1992.
There were no
couples of different colour watching Bianco e Nero at
a
Farida Tazi
from
At the next table
Francesca Parente sits with her boyfriend Cheik Kone from
Both were dressed
for the evening - her in high-heeled boots and him in a shiny jacket - to go to
see Sweeney Todd, because Francesca fancies Johnny Depp
and she's paying.
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