Mi piace lavorare (Mobbing)

Italian actress Nicoletta Braschi plays a character that gets put through the corporate ringer and amazingly 'rolls with the punches' while trying to raise her latchkey daughter alone. Amazingly, she never loses control though what's being done to her certainly warrants a violent outburst. Apparently in Italy, what she goes through with her new manager at work in a technique called 'mobbing', where a new merging company is unable to fire longtime employees so they do everything possible to humiliate the worker to get them to quit on their own. During the course of the movie 'Anna' (Braschi) is transferred numerous times within the company to more and more demeaning jobs (she's put in charge of running the copy machine at one point) until finally ... well I don't want to spoil it for you. Suffice to say this is a very sobering account of unethical corporate policy and it is told very realistically with little or no humor at all (though some comic relief would have been gratefully appreciated by this reviewer). Good one to see if you want to get the heads up on a dirty practice that still goes on today in the corporate world.

The film shows the real Italian situation of work places, where women are not treated as men, and company employees in general suffer from an extreme form of flexibility that becomes actually precariousness and instability. Francesca Comencini is really talented if you also think about the low budget cost of the film (the project started as a documentary, only after it became a real movie) and Nicoletta Braschi, the only professional actor, finally shows that with the right director and the right story she can be able to actually play (and very well), not just being sexy Benigni's wife. This was a brave and challenging topic, because treating "mobbing" is treating something real and painful but not easily verbalized by people who suffered from it. Watch it and think that probably even you have been probably victim of it, once or twice in your life, in a milder way, but you could't recognize it at the time was happening and you thought there was something wrong in yourself. Well, there wasn't.