Ladrões de Sabonete

A fun takeoff on the serious drama of "The Bicycle Thief." The film contrasts the intense, self-centered film director; his characters, who are just trying to make things turn out more pleasantly for themselves; the ideal and imaginary people we see in commercials; and the people in the television audience who see any film chopped up into bits that fit around commercials and other station business.

A film critic who uses the notes he prepared for another film tries to evaluate and analyze the film the television program is playing (titled "The Icicle Thief"), while the director in the studio sputters in disbelief. The characters in the melodramatic black-and-white film are stuck in drudgery and dispair until the fantasy characters in the commercials start to enter their lives. The audience, represented by a typical family, just looks at the screen whenever there is nothing better to do, while the television program chatters on in their mundane existence. Could this be us? Could this be you?

This movie is not supposed to make you laugh. Nor is it merely a parody of "The Bicycle Thief". It is a meditation on the way Contemporary Italian Directors are treated, or mistreated, in current-day Italy. It is also a reflection of how these film directors are Intellectual shunned by "Intellectual" film critics in favor of more time honored classics such as "The Bicycle Thief" and also how films are treated by the Television Companies, which produce or co-produce most modern Italian films. Personally, I think it's a great and bizarre film which owes alot to Fellini's 8 1/2. the way the three worlds in the film begin to inter-weave is very clever. If you like weird movies that trancend meta-levels, See this now!

A somewhat self-important film director attends a TV studio where his latest film, The Icicle Thief, is to be shown as part of an arts programme. During transmission, loud colour commercials constantly interrupt the sombre black and white film, frustrating the director. A power failure results in a strange fusion where he enters the world of his film which itself has fused with the commercials that have been relentlessly interrupting it.

This Italian comedy is the brain child of Maurizio Nichetti who not only plays a dual role of the film director and star of the movie-within-a-movie, but also directs the film proper as well as co-wrote the thing. So quite a labour of love and an impressive achievement. The movie operates I guess in three distinct ways – as a parody of the film The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Italian neo-realism in general, a satirical assessment of commercialism vs art and lastly as an inventive bit of imaginative cinema where three worlds merge together. The worlds of course are the 'real' world of the TV studio and households watching television, the world of the movie itself and lastly the world of the commercials. It's an idea which is executed very nicely with some fun cross-references between the realities which allows for a few amusing observations. It's an idea which was used in Woody Allen's earlier The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) but Nichetti definitely takes the concept further and makes more of it. Overall, this is an amusing, inventive and clever bit of comedy.

This offbeat Italian comedy uses the familiar black and white/color dichotomy to indicate different worlds, a technique always in danger of being overdone. Last time I saw it was in Hollywood's Pleasantville (1998) where it was so cloying it annoyed; the first time magically in The Wizard of Oz (1939). It was even done (to good effect) in Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). Here the "film" is in black and white (as it's being shown on TV) and the commercials are in color. The characters bizarrely go from one "world" to the other while somewhere in between is the "real" world of TV viewers. Because the world of TV commercials is the more fantastic, I think the technique works well here.

Maurizio Nichetti, who might (and might not) remind you of Roberto Benigni, stars as Anotonio Piermattei, the icicle thief, the protagonist of the movie within a movie, which is a Bicycle Thief-like tragic film that the TV people manage to mangle into a TV-like romantic comedy. (If you're wondering how one can be an icicle thief, keep wondering. I'll never tell.) Nichetti also plays the auteur of the film being shown on TV who is invited to be interviewed but never gets to speak partly because the film critic who is to do the interview thinks they are viewing a different film.

The title notwithstanding, this is not a satire or a "spoof" of Vittorio De Sica's internationally acclaimed The Bicycle Thief (1948), although De Sica himself might be seen as being lightly satirized. Nichetti's The Icicle Thief is more like an identification as it attempts to stand with the art film solidly against commercialism. However any similarity between the film within a film here and De Sica's masterpiece is sycophantic. This is not to say that The Icicle Thief does not have its moments and its charm. It does.

Caterina Sylos Labini who plays Maria, Antonio Piermattei's singing wife, is charming as the archetypical Italian femme fatale, a dark, lusty, earthy woman who can cry and laugh at the drop of a hat. She is contrasted with Heidi Komarck, a colorized blonde model in a butch haircut who does TV commercials. Komarck looks like a member of the Swedish ski team draped in a lingerie outfit that leaves little to the imagination while speaking only American English. My favorite part of the film was the cute shtick with Maria's happy one-year-old daughter who crawls continually into mischief (grabbing a knife by the blade, putting an electric wire in her mouth, etc.) but somehow never has to shed a tear.

That this is a satire and spoof of TV (and not De Sica's Bicycle Thief or old-time neo-realism itself) is immediately apparent when the TV film critic has to ask the name of the film he is critiquing. On TV the only things that really matter are the commercials. So, to the extent that a "Big Big" candy bar jingle and a laundry detergent superhero triumph over a black and white neo-realistic film, we can see that triumph as a satire of television and its middle-brow audience.

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A movie is shown on Italian TV, edited for time and content and butchered so badly even the characters in the film don't know where they end and the commercials begin. Incensed, the director hops a train to Rome to complain to the Italian Film Board of the mockery being made of his film. Unfortunately, his train arrives at the terminal in the film, and he becomes part of the ever-increasingly discombobulated action.

This is a comedic masterwork of satire, spoof and slapstick. While the film's title and the "film-within-a-film" are both take-offs on DiSica's classic "The Bicycle Thief", this is, in fact inspired by the best of Chaplin, Keaton and, in some ways, "Your Show of Shows". Director/star Maurizio Nichetti keeps the comic action going at a furious pace, never missing an opportunity to assault the film industry marketing hype and TV industry advertising joke he so disdains.

You won't want to think about the satire, though, while you're watching this. No matter how much you may hate subtitled films, this is a genuine riot, and you will not stop laughing.