The Worst Christmas of My Life (2012)

Italian cinema has long maintained a robust trade in the holiday farce, and The Worst Christmas of My Life arrives as a dutiful installment in that tradition. Paolo must reach the castle of Alberto Caccia for Christmas with his wife Margherita, who is nine months pregnant, and a houseful of relatives. Through an escalating series of blunders he convinces the assembled company that Alberto has died by his own hand. Alessandro Genovesi directs with the efficiency of a man who knows precisely which doors to slam and when.

Assessed against the cultural currents of the present decade, the film offers the examiner nothing to work with. The cast is uniformly Italian, drawn from the country's television and comedy circuit, and their presence carries no argument about who deserves to be on screen. The pregnancy is a device for physical comedy and scheduling anxiety, not a statement about bodies or autonomy. The women bicker, the men flail, and no gender politics are advanced or contested. Wealth exists as a castle and a set of cars, and nobody proposes to redistribute it. There is no race, no climate, no diagnosis, no lesson, no sermon. The gravediggers appear as a punchline and remain a punchline.

The result is a relic of a specific and now unfashionable mode: comedy that wants only to make an audience laugh at a man trapped in a snowbound house with his in-laws. It is the second film in a series, and it performed well in its home market, which tells us something about what Italian audiences wanted in December of 2012. We file it accordingly. A clean specimen. Nothing to debate, nothing to decode, and no homework assigned to anyone.

A note on taxonomy, since the discipline demands it: the picture is a sequel, and it is nothing else on our list. No statuette, no reboot, no true story, no comic book, no cape, and no domestic chart-topping to its name. The cellar remains empty. We record the vintage and move on to the next bottle.