Bianco, rosso e Verdone (1981)

We approach Bianco, rosso e Verdone with the weary professionalism of a sommelier uncorking a bottle of Lambrusco. Carlo Verdone's 1981 comedy follows three men on election day, each journey a study in Italian dysfunction. The film's cultural sensibilities are those of a previous era, a time when a pedantic clerk driving his wife to distraction was simply funny, not a teachable moment about emotional labor. There is no modern representation casting to speak of, unless we count a Russian actress with striking blue eyes as a stand-in for Roman wifehood. The LGBTQ+ themes are absent, as are climate concerns and body positivity. We searched for a feminist agenda and found only Magda's escape with a handsome stranger, played for laughs. Racial consciousness is not on the menu either, though the film does note the regional condescension shown to southern emigrants. None of this is a failing. It is simply a film from 1981 that has not been retrofitted with contemporary pieties.

The lone flicker of sermonizing arrives late, when Pasquale, a nearly mute immigrant in Germany, finally snaps. His rant against the Italian state and the pointlessness of voting is impassioned and unintelligible, a burst of political exasperation that lasts just long enough to register as a message. But the film quickly returns to its comic business, and we are left with the impression that the rant is less a lecture than a pressure valve. The other characters offer no such relief. Furio's obsessive nitpicking is a character trait, not a diagnosis. Mimmo's naivety is not neurodivergence. The grandmother's death in the voting booth is a grim punchline, not a revisionist history. We note these absences without judgment, as a botanist might note the absence of orchids in a parking lot.

The result is a film that scores near zero on every marker of modern social consciousness, except for that brief, wearying rant. We award it a negligible nod for lecture energy, and nothing else. It is a relic, but a harmless one, like a faded campaign poster for a party that no longer exists. We watched it with the mild fatigue of a critic who has seen every cause and every backlash, and we found it refreshingly free of both.