Johnny Stecchino
Directed by Roberto Benigni
- comedy
The story
Good hearted but not very wordly-wise, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.
What it’s like
Bright, sun-struck Sicily in broad daylight: sun-bleached piazzas, dusty yellow-ochre streets, Palermo villas in pale stone and hot blue sea, all shot in a loose, mobile style that keeps Roberto Benigni's manic physical comedy in frame. Benigni plays two near-identical men, a gentle, fumbling bus driver and a crooked gangster, so the camera often lingers on doubled reflections and mistaken identities, with bright open colour and a bouncy, buoyant score that never tips into menace. The mood is warm, silly and slapstick, with plenty of rapid cutting, mugging and fast verbal gags. Its mafia subplot is played for laughs: there are guns and a few tense moments, but the violence is cartoonish and never graphic, and nothing lingers on cruelty. Romance runs underneath, a bashful, slightly lopsided courtship between Dante and Maria that feels sweet and unforced. It suits a lazy weekend afternoon, a light comfort watch, or a night when you want something silly and sunny with no real harm. It is best for people who enjoy farce, physical clowning and gentle absurdity.
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