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Ratataplan
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| Year: |
1979
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Director: |
Maurizio Nichetti
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| Stars: |
Maurizio Nichetti, Lidia Biondi, Angela Finnochiaro, Roland Topor, Edy Angelillo, Giorgio White, Umberto Gallone, Enrico Grazioli, Ione Greghi, Gaetano Porro, Giorgio Cardarelli, Heidi Hansen, Maruska Motlova, Osvaldo Salvi, Serena Sartori, Dario Sereni
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| Genre: |
Comedy |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Colombo (Maurizio Nichetti) is late for his appointment for a job interview, and they almost start without him. Around ten men, him included, arrange themselves around a table at this office and are told to draw a tree: somehow this will grade their suitability for the work, so Colombo brings out all the pens he has in his pockets to make sure his picture is the best of the lot. After a while the candidates are instructed to stop drawing, and their artwork is taken off them to be assessed; but when the administrators return, they accept all of the men into the business except Colombo...
His drawing stood out as too perfect, apparently, so he was obviously some kind of misfit, and yet again he is out of work in this, the first comedy feature directed by Nichetti, who may not be the most famous filmmaker out of Italy, but he is one of the most innovative and imaginative, even on the slender means of this initial work. This burst with its designer's creativity, so much so that even if you didn't need to speak Italian to understand what was going on - Colombo had no dialogue - it was easy to get a little lost when trying to work out where the next extended sketch-like plotline was heading.
So this was episodic stuff as Colombo made his way through life in a style reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, but equally in the methods of the cartoons Nichetti was a fan of, and a contributor to (including the title sequence here). Therefore a mix of slapstick and surrealism was on offer as things frequently grew frankly bizarre, but never in a way that would alienate the audience as he had a genuinely likeable quallty that stems from watching an entertainer fashioning the fertile ideas of his imagination into something that would make a kind of sense in film. Simply watching what he came up with was pleasure enough, even if at this stage there was an unmistakably ramshackle quality to the finished production, although that could be just as diverting.
Indeed, it was that second hand junk shop tone and appearance to Ratataplan which amused as Nichetti's ingenuity papered over most of the cracks in low budget or jokes which were that bit too remote to truly engage with the viewer. It was enough to know Colombo was our hero, and we were hoping for the best for him, that carried you along through his mishaps and adventures, which always saw him returning to the hubbub of his home, where his neighbours are forever causing a commotion outside. They included the attractive dancer (Edy Angelillo) who he has his heart foolishly set on, in spite of her already having a boyfriend who is part of the group Colombo ends up working with halfway through the movie.
This part can be the most baffling of all, as even after the sequence where Colombo fetches an increasingly contaminated glass of water for a suffering company boss (Roland Topor, an artist in his own right, though more of an agitator than Nichetti) turns into a quasi-religious spoof of miracles and the effect they have, quite what was happening when the protagonist is awoken by a stern, possibly deranged bully and taken with his neighbours in a van out into the suburbs was hard to fathom. When you know these neighbours were part of Nichetti's theatre group you begin to get a better idea of the premise, which is that they are putting on a "magic show" which ends in ridiculous disaster, but it was really the final episode this was best remembered for. This was where Colombo opts to build a far more successful with the opposite sex version of himself in disco-dancing robot form, which works up to a point, until Nichetti's real life partner Angela Finnochiaro shows up to make him content to be himself. Silly and charming, even better was to come from this filmmaker. Catchy music by Detto Mariano.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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