‘Bread & Tulips’

A housewife takes leave of her unappreciative family in this offbeat road movie.   [PG-13]

By: Kam Williams
   Even with a film, looks can be deceiving. From its plot outline, Bread & Tulips (Pane e Tulipani), an offbeat romantic comedy written and directed by Silvio Soldini (Le Acrobate), certainly appears like it can’t miss. The thumbnail sketch reads as follows: Rosalba, long taken for granted by an abusive husband and her indifferent teen-age sons, chooses to hitchhike her way home from vacation after she is accidentally separated from her family.
   The unappreciated housewife decides to spice up her blasé life by deliberately engaging in a series of exciting-sounding misadventures. Running short on cash, she shacks up with a suicidal waiter in Venice and takes a job with a florist. Meanwhile, her hubby hires a detective to track down his spouse because his mistress refuses to assume any of his wife’s domestic duties.
   While one would expect the "wife out of water" theme to lend itself to levity, it doesn’t. Innumerable quirky characters cross our cinematic path, but everything unfolds without chemistry and as predictably as a typical TV sitcom.
   Licia Maglietta, who also starred in director Soldini’s Le Acrobate, injects considerable passion into her role as the adventurous Rosalba, a middle-aged woman intent on making the most of an impulsive flight of fancy. Bruno Ganz (The Boys from Brazil) does an acceptable turn as the forlorn waiter willing to take in Rosalba.
   The film’s fatal flaw, however, is a puerile script that telegraphs every punch. For instance, the first time Rosalba enters Bruno’s apartment, we see a dangling noose, a not-so-subtle sign the morose man is severely depressed and on the edge. This ‘slap-in-the-face’ style of humor works for a quick laugh, but undercuts the audience’s ability to take the front story seriously.
   The upshot is that Bread & Tulips is saddled by an interminable pace that carves out an arid desert of emptiness between its obvious jokes. One feels overly grateful for those brief breaks from the monotony when another nut is introduced, even though each person’s stagy behavior would play better on the idiot box. Imagine an episode of I Love Lucy with 90 minutes of meaningless filler tossed in.
   What little tension exists depends on those types of misunderstandings and mistaken identities that are the trademark of the American TV sitcom. These are the ones that would be cleared up in a second if people were only willing to speak the truth. We’re barely able to buy it for a half-hour show, but when passed off as an art film, it’s infuriating.
   Bread & Tulips trades in this plot device endlessly, from Rosalba’s assumption that she’d been abandoned by her family, to a masseuse who mistakes a detective for a client, to Rosalba believing a young boy to be Bruno’s son.
   If it weren’t my job to see such a tedious bore, I’d have left early enough to catch an I Love Lucy re-run.
Rated PG-13. Contains brief adult language, some sensuality and drug references.