Welcome to the North (2012)

Benvenuti al Nord arrives as the second installment in a franchise that has discovered the reliable comedy of Italian geography. Alberto has returned to Milan, Mattia remains in the south, and a postal transfer sends the latter northward into a world of cold efficiency and colder greetings. The film mines the friction between northern and southern temperaments for laughs, with the diligence of a regional tourism board. There is a plot about a Japanese-inspired efficiency plan for the Italian postal service, which functions as a comedic engine and nothing more. No one is asked to reconsider the structure of labor, only its punctuality.

The cast is uniformly Italian, which is to say it is exactly what the setting requires and not a single performer more. The women in the story occupy themselves with husbands, children, and the ambition their menfolk lack. Maria wants Mattia to take his job seriously now that there is a son to raise. Silvia wants Alberto to come home. These are grievances, not manifestos. Nobody in the film has been issued a position paper, and nobody delivers one.

It is, at heart, a brisk commercial exercise. It earned more than twenty-seven million euros and the third-best opening in Italian market history, a figure that says more about the national appetite for self-deprecating regional humor than about any cultural awakening. The film jokes about discrimination in its loosest sense, the kind involving a Milanese landlord and a Neapolitan accent. It challenges stereotypes and confirms them in roughly equal measure, then goes home. For those of us who catalogue such things, it is a clean ledger. Nothing to record. Nothing to argue about.