Cado dalle nubi (2009)

There is a moment in "Cado dalle nubi" when a young man from Polignano a Mare boards a train for Milan and the film quietly announces its true subject: the ancient, unkillable feud between the Italian north and the Italian south. Checco Zalone plays a version of himself, a clumsy singer of limited self-awareness, dumped by his girlfriend and dispatched northward to seek his fortune. What follows is a comedy of regional manners, in which a leghista father who despises Southerners must reckon with his daughter's affection for one. The satire is real but gentle, aimed at separatist posturing and the small cruelties of provincial snobbery. It is anti-prejudice in a regional key, not a racial one, and the film has no interest in widening the frame.

The most forward-leaning strand belongs to Checco's cousin Alfredo, who shares an apartment with his boyfriend Manolo and spends much of the running time avoiding the family conversation he knows is coming. The coming-out sequence is handled with more warmth than one expects from a mainstream Italian comedy of this vintage, though it never stops being a comedic device. Marika, meanwhile, exists to be loved and to be the daughter of a bigot. No feminist architecture surrounds her. The television singing competition, where Checko eventually lands, is ribbed lightly and then abandoned; there is no argument about capital, no environmental conscience, no meditation on the body or the mind. The film wants to make you laugh at a man falling off a stage, and it succeeds at that, and little else.

The tolerance message arrives through jokes instead of sermons, which is perhaps why it lands so softly. It is a pleasant, shapeless thing, content to observe that Northerners and Southerners are equally ridiculous, and that a gay cousin deserves a seat at the table. Pleasant is the operative word. Nothing here demands anything of the viewer, which may be the most Italian quality of all.