At first I was favorably impressed with the filming of "Eat, Pray, Love", but I have to reconsider in the face of an almost unanimous torrent of negative reviews from Italian newspapers that are incensed by the almost exclusively "cliched" negative outdated Italian stereotypes. 

Roberts plays the American journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote a bestselling book about a year she spent travelling in Italy, India and Indonesia trying to get over a divorce, a rebound romance and the feeling that her life in New York was devoid of meaning. 

Sections of the film are shot in Rome, where Roberts' character delights in the idiosyncrasies of the locals and tucks into endless ice creams and plates of pasta.....

It is billed as a feel-good film, but reviewers have given it a merciless roasting since it opened in more than 300 Italian cinemas last week. 

"It rains spaghetti, the Italians are always gesticulating and following foreign girls shouting vulgarities, but then getting engaged to a nice housewife to please their domineering mothers. "And there's lots of pizza," wrote a reviewer in La Repubblica, giving the film 2.5 marks out of a maximum score of six. 

Gilbert's memoir has sold around six million copies and has been translated into 30 languages but La Repubblica advised: "If you haven't already read it, it's hard to see why you would want to after seeing the film." 

"The movie, which co-stars Spanish actor Javier Bardem, was also damned by La Stampa, which said its portrayal of Italy was deeply kitsch. 

"The apartment in the old part of town without any hot water but with a nosy landlady....a group of boys who in Piazza di Spagna follow a tourist and touch her up ... the couple who indulge in heavy petting in plain view of everyone ... and then the pantomime conversations, the noisy racket ... the Italian part of the journey is packed with stereotypes." 

The newspaper said the film pandered to tired stereotypes held by Americans about Italy dating back to the 1950s. 

"That's the way they like us in the United States: dark, boisterous, uninhibited: we've always known that, but this time the effect is beyond the limits." 

During the film's premiere in Rome last week, even Roberts herself conceded that the film relied on stock images of Italians. 

"I realise I should know a thing or two about stereotypes as I come from the south of the United States," she said. "But everything we put in the film was done with humour and great affection. I hope you Italians don't dislike it." Even in her home country, however, the film does not escape censure. 

The Washington Post found that it "delivers Italian stereotypes in spades". 

"There are the derri?re-pinching men in the piazzas, the housewives screaming in the outdoor market, the old crones in black ? all of which still exist but hardly define current-day Rome.....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/
italy/8013700/Italians-slam-cliched-Julia-Roberts-film.html
 

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