Mom or Dad? (2017)

Riccardo Milani's 2017 comedy arrives with a premise that any screenwriter would envy and most would squander: a divorced couple, Valeria and Nicola, both desperate to unload their three children onto the other. The Italian film is a remake of the French Daddy or Mommy, which explains the brisk, well-oiled machinery of the thing. Paola Cortellesi and Antonio Albanese are gifted farceurs, and they spend ninety minutes sabotaging each other's careers and dinner parties with the grim efficiency of people who have read the manual.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and the film seems content to leave it that way. Valeria's refusal of the maternal instinct is a mild inversion of expectation, though it exists to fuel slapstick, not argument. The couple's naked careerism gets mined for laughs, and the joke lands on their vanity, never on the system that rewards it. Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. No race, no queerness, no climate, no bodies to be positive about, no neurodivergent subplot, no history to revise. The film has no interest in instructing anyone. It wants to make you laugh at a man hiding in a hotel bathroom from his own son.

A contemporary Italian domestic comedy from 2017, adapted from a French hit, is not the likeliest vessel for the social currents of the decade, and this one does not pretend otherwise. It is a machine for gags, competently assembled, and it never once stops to tell us how to feel about the world. There is something almost restful in that. Almost.