Full Description
The social critic and comic genius, Ettore Scola, returns with a sunny, bittersweet comedy set in a quaint neighborhood of Rome, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Umberto (Diego Abatantuono) is a dashing gentile from Milan who owns a clothing store in the Jewish quarter. Leone (Sergio Castellito), a scrappy Roman Jew, owns the store next door. The two are fierce, antagonistic, competitors, whose relationship is complicated by the romantic liaison that develops between Umberto’s bookish son, Paolo, and Leone’s beautiful daughter, Susana. But when Mussolini enacts the racial laws of 1938, Umberto and brother-in-law, Angelo (Gerard Depardieu), never hesitate. They stand together with their Jewish neighbors and set out to prove that in union there is strength.
Filmmaker Bio(s)
Ettore Scola entered the film industry as a screenwriter in 1953, contriubting bright material to the films of Dino Risi and other directors. Later as director himself, his film WE ALL LOVED EAACHOTHER SO MUCH (1974), dedicated to Vittorio De Sica, captured the essence of 30 years of postwar Italian cinema. Scola won the Best Direction prize at Cannes for UGLY, DIRTY AND MEAN (1976), a vivid portrait of misery. His SPECIAL DAY (1977) - a politically-based allegorical depiction of a brief liason between a jaded housewife (Sophia Loren) and a homosexual journalist (Marcello Mastroianni) under the gathering clouds of World War II - was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps one of his most ambitious films was THAT NIGHT IN VARENNES (1982), a masterful, fanciful, visually striking idea-rich costume epic of the French Revolution. History, politics, and people, and the effect they have on one another, continue to be a core theme in the films of Scola, one of the most highly regarded figures in European cinema today.
