7 and 8 (2007)

Il 7 e l'8 arrives from a specific moment in Italian popular cinema, 2007, when the comic duo Ficarra and Picone stepped behind the camera after years of cabaret work on programs like Zelig. The premise is sturdy: a maternity ward nurse, cheated by a lottery ticket that read 7 instead of 8, swaps two infants out of spite. Thirty-one years later the two men, one a petty criminal, one a stalled law student, collide in the street and slowly unravel the switch. It is a machine built for misunderstandings, and it runs smoothly on the friction between two temperaments.

The audit, conducted with the usual instruments, returns a clean sheet. The cast is drawn from Sicilian stage and screen, with the dancer Eleonora Abbagnato making her film debut, and no effort is made to arrange the players along any contemporary axis. The romances are heterosexual and uncomplicated. The women serve as love interests and relatives. Race never enters the frame in a Palermo the film treats as culturally uniform. There is no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no discourse on bodies or brains. The economic backdrop, petty theft and thesis deadlines, exists as texture, not as argument. Nobody lectures. The camera simply watches two men discover they are the wrong men.

For a viewer conditioned to the current dispensation, the experience is almost restful. The film has no thesis to advance and no audience to correct. It was nominated for a David di Donatello for best new director and did brisk business at home, which tells us what Italian audiences wanted in 2007: a farce, delivered without a message. We file it accordingly, under comedy, unburdened by instruction and entirely at peace with itself. The classification is quick, and the ledger stays blank. Some vintages simply refuse to be complicated, and this is one of them. We note it, we shelve it, we move on to the next bottle.

We file it accordingly, under comedy, unburdened by instruction and entirely at peace with itself. The classification is quick, and the ledger stays blank. Some vintages simply refuse to be complicated, and this is one of them. We note it, we shelve it, we move on to the next bottle. The film offers no instruction manual for living, no corrective for the audience, and no contemporary scaffolding whatsoever. It is a farce, and it knows it is a farce, which is more than most pictures can manage. We record the result without ceremony and return the sample to the shelf, where it will keep indefinitely, requiring no refrigeration and offending no one. The whole affair, from the swapped cribs to the Calabrian convent, proceeds on charm alone, and charm, whatever the current market rate, remains a commodity that resists scoring entirely. We close the file with a shrug of professional respect, and we wait for a more demanding vintage to arrive, as it always does, sooner than anyone would like. The end, then, of a brief and untroubled audit, filed under comedy, dated, and left to breathe in the dark of the archive where all such harmless curiosities are kept, gathering a fine and unremarkable dust, awaiting a reappraisal that will almost certainly never come, and that is, in its own quiet way, a kind of mercy.