Fun Is Beautiful

The film tells three separate stories one after another, with the same actor in all three. In the first a provincial young man arrives in Rome by bus; in the second a man cannot get out from under his mother's shadow; in the third a son drives the length of Italy from Calabria to see his sick father. Three types, three provinces, one portrait of a country. The film is not interested in sketch comedy. It is interested in Italy looking at itself: Carlo Verdone builds his types as caricature, and under each of them lies a real loneliness. The third story leaves comedy behind and ties directly into pain. The form is episodic: motorway, bus station, provincial houses and Rome. The three parts are not connected; only the actor is common. Carlo Verdone directed, wrote and played all three roles. Sergio Leone produced; he was backing Verdone's first films at the time, and this is his second feature. It was a large box-office success in Italy and made Verdone one of the country's best-known comic actors. Mario Brega is in the cast, a face familiar from Leone's westerns. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian comedy and films carried by a single actor's characterisations. Who it is not for: anyone without the context. The humour rests entirely on Italian provincial dialects and the habits of the period, and most of it is lost in translation.