What a Beautiful Day (2011)

Che bella giornata arrives from 2011, a year when Italian cinema was still comfortable letting a bumbling Milanese nightclub bouncer fail his carabiniere exam three times and call it a plot. Checco Zalone plays the title fool, a man whose stated reason for wanting police work is the perks and the cronyism, a confession delivered at the oral examination with the confidence of a man who has never once been told no. Through an archbishop's recommendation he lands as a security guard at the Milan Cathedral, where he stumbles into a terrorist conspiracy and, by degrees, into the affections of the woman sent to manipulate him. It is a farce, and it knows it.

The film's Arab characters, Sufien and his sister Farah, sit at the center of the machinery, though they arrive as caricature first and people second. Farah's arc bends toward sentimental redemption: she is softened by Checco's family, his trullo, his guileless kindness, and she abandons the bombing. This is humanization by way of the male lead's charm, and the woman exists to be won over by it. There is no framework of cultural critique here, no accounting for the unspecified bombing that killed her family. The comedy treats terrorism as a prop and ethnicity as a punchline, which is a different thing from representation.

Elsewhere the film is a running gag about Italian institutions, cronyism, bureaucratic perks, the relatives all named Capobianco. None of this amounts to a critique of capital, and no climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurological diversity, no historical revision intrudes. The film preaches nothing. It wants only to be funny, and in Italy it very much was, outgrossing Avatar in its opening weekend and briefly claiming the domestic record. We are left to classify a comedy that has no message at all, which in this line of work is its own kind of relief.