This could be likened to The Purple Rose of Cairo, but why should anyone want to do that? Dislikened to it, if there were such a verb, would be certain to get more takers. The premise is one of those that inevitably seems more complicated in the retelling than in the original watching. An Italian film director called Maurizio Nichetti, who is played by the actual Italian film director of that name, is the guest in a TV studio for a national broadcast of one of his films. That film, which bears the same title as the broader film that encompasses it, is a present-day replica of a neo-realist work, shot accordingly in black-and-white and set in the post-war period and starring the selfsame Maurizio Nichetti. The unfolding film is interrupted from time to time by color commercials, as well as by domestic scenes of a family half-watching the presentation on their living-room TV. Soon there begin to occur some form-altering interactions between the people in the three separate arenas: the little boy in the black-and-white film sees a Big-Big candy bar in the hand and mouth of the little boy at home watching the first little boy on television, and the first one wants a candy bar of his own; an Amazonian model in a blue swimsuit dives into a pool in the middle of a sports-car ad and resurfaces in a black-and-white river after the commerical break; etc. The director, upset at the changes being wrought in his masterpiece, enters his own film to straighten out the mess and to restore it to its original form. All of which must have sounded splendid in the "pitch" stage. (Perhaps a wee bit predictably, the adjective "Pirandellian" crops up in the production notes, as it undoubtedly did too in the preliminary "pitch.") The "catch," however, is something else. The initial black-and-white scenes are unencouragingly wobbly in tone, torn as they are between a desire for accuracy (the background music and some of the smoky, greenish grays are right on the money) and a desire to put in some jokes. You sometimes have to wait what seems a very long time for one of those to come along; and when you spot one, you do not do so with a smile. Even once the wires get crossed and the realities get mixed, the black-and-white scenes continue to drag (if the color ones don't, it's only because they are shorter). The problem might have been palliated had the cross-over of one reality into another created a whole new level of reality, a new level of awareness or curiosity on the part of the participants (rather than just created a very low level of joke). The problem might have been palliated, too, had we not had The Purple Rose of Cairo to remind us how high a level was attainable. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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