Sun in Buckets (2013)

Sole a catinelle, the fourth highest-grossing Italian film of its era, tells us more about the national appetite for Checco Zalone's provincial mischief than about any ideological program. The plot follows a vacuum cleaner salesman undone by the 2008 crisis and by the predatory loans of a company called FidoFly, which repossesses his life one appliance at a time. A critique of corporate greed sits near the surface. The villains are dishonest Freemasons with a taste for financial chicanery, and the film closes with its hero dressed as a Soviet minister, a communist flag overhead, a replica of Mao's Little Red Book in his hand. This is class resentment played for laughs, and it lands as comedy first and sermon second, which keeps the ideological temperature moderate.

The more curious thread concerns Lorenzo, a wealthy boy with selective mutism whose condition becomes a genuine plot mechanism, complete with a psychologist and a filmmaker father too self-absorbed to notice his son. The film treats the condition with narrative seriousness without turning it into a case study. Elsewhere the women hold jobs and opinions, the cast remains resolutely Italian, and nobody pauses to explain anything about identity, climate, or the body. The movie has other things on its mind, chiefly a car, a boy, and a great many vacuum cleaners.

By the standards of the present cultural moment, this is a mild specimen. It stumbles into a critique of wealth while chasing a punchline, and it does so with a shrug. The comedy is broad, the sentiment is Italian, and the moral is that debt is bad and aunts are cheap. We have seen worse offenders. We have also seen films with more to say. This one mostly wants to sell you a vacuum cleaner, and it succeeds.