Like a Cat on a Highway (2017)
Directed by Riccardo Milani
No — Like a Cat on a Highway is not woke, scoring 14 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Riccardo Milani's 2017 comedy concerns Giovanni, a Brussels-bound technocrat who runs a think tank studying whether handing money to the poor in the peripheral zones might improve their lives, and Monica, a single mother from Bastogi whose son has fallen for Giovanni's daughter.
Consciousness Markers
The plot centers on EU funding to lift the poor out of peripheral areas, and Giovanni's climactic speech abandons his technocratic script to indict how hard life is for the poor — a class-conscious, mildly anti-elite streak.
Giovanni's Brussels speech about the struggles of the poor delivers an explicit social message, though the comedic tone keeps the preaching relatively light.
Monica is a resilient single mother and the emotional anchor, but the film frames her through class rather than any feminist critique of gender structures.
The cast is almost entirely white Italian, with only a minor Bengalese neighbor character who becomes Monica's business partner. No meaningful diverse casting effort.
The immigrant Bengalese neighbor integrated into Monica's pizzeria offers a faint nod to multicultural Italy, but race is never a subject of the film's commentary.
No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear anywhere in the film.
No environmental or climate themes are present.
No body positivity themes are present.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are present.
The film is a contemporary comedy with no historical revisionism.
Why it received this score
Riccardo Milani's 2017 comedy concerns Giovanni, a Brussels-bound technocrat who runs a think tank studying whether handing money to the poor in the peripheral zones might improve their lives, and Monica, a single mother from Bastogi whose son has fallen for Giovanni's daughter. Their children's romance forces an uneasy alliance, then an actual one. The film is a class comedy of manners, and it knows it. The windshield gets smashed with a baseball bat in the first act, which tells us most of what we need to know about the temperature of the thing.
On the matter of representation, the film is an almost entirely white Italian affair. A Bengalese neighbor drifts through the margins and eventually becomes Monica's business partner in the pizzeria, a gesture toward multicultural Italy that the screenplay declines to examine. Race is not a subject here, it is set dressing. Gender fares little better. Monica is resilient and she is the emotional spine of the picture, but the film reads her through economics, not through any accounting of the structures that put her there. The lens is class, and it stays on class.
The closing act delivers the sermon. Giovanni travels to Brussels, abandons his prepared remarks, and tells the commission what poverty actually costs. It is a class-conscious indictment of comfortable people, mildly anti-elite in flavor, and it lands with the soft thud of a message the film has been carrying politely for ninety minutes. The comedy keeps the lecturing from curdling. Nothing else stirs. There is no environmental conscience, no inquiry into bodies or minds, no reworking of the historical record. The film leaves us with a warm, well-acted portrait of two Italies trying to share a bench, and a cat that will not survive the traffic for long.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
The story of an encounter between a bourgeois man and a poor woman, because their teenage children fall in love.
Questions about Like a Cat on a Highway
Is Like a Cat on a Highway woke?
No — Like a Cat on a Highway is not woke, scoring 14 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Like a Cat on a Highway have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Eat the Rich (30). On Eat the Rich: The plot centers on EU funding to lift the poor out of peripheral areas, and Giovanni's climactic speech abandons his technocratic script to indict how hard life is for the poor — a class-conscious, mildly anti-elite streak.
How does Like a Cat on a Highway compare to other 2017 movies?
It ranks #130 of the 309 films from 2017 we've scored; their average is 19. The wokest is I Am Not Your Negro (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.