The Rich, the Pauper and the Butler (2014)

The Aldo, Giovanni and Giacomo trio return with a comedy of reversed fortunes, in which a wealthy broker, his dutiful butler, and a street vendor find their stations shuffled by accident. The machinery is familiar: mistaken identity, financial ruin, the indignity of a man accustomed to linen now selling trinkets from a cart. The film is brisk, professional, and content to be a farce. Nobody involved appears to have ambitions beyond the next gag, and the gags arrive on schedule.

On the matter of social consciousness, the cupboard is bare. The premise brushes against class resentment, letting a rich man taste poverty for ninety minutes, but the film treats inequality as a costume to be worn and discarded, never as a system to be indicted. The cast is Italian and white, with a Spanish actress in a small role and no evident appetite for anything else. Women appear as wives, servants, and objects of confusion; the film has no argument to make about them. Race, sexuality, climate, body image, and neurodivergence are simply absent, which in a 2014 Italian slapstick comedy is not a failing so much as a description. There is no sermon here. The film wants only to make you laugh at a man falling into a fountain.

The result is a modest, harmless entertainment, the kind that plays well on a Sunday evening and vanishes by Monday. It gestures at the gap between rich and poor the way a waiter gestures at a menu: aware of the item, unwilling to order it. For the purposes of classification, this is a film with almost nothing to say and no apparent regret about that. We file it accordingly, with a small nod to the butler, who at least knows his place, and the film, which knows its own limits even better. A quiet entry in an unquiet canon. Nothing more is asked of it, and nothing more is given.

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