eat your fill

While I’m talking about film, I wanna shoutout Ladri di Saponette by Maurizio Nichetti, a criminally underrated Italian absurdist pastiche comedy from the 80s that spoofs Ladri di Biciclette, a genre-defining neorealist film from the 40s.

It depicts a director (Nichetti himself) who is promoting his eponymous film, a more pessimistic and consumerist-tainted Ladri di Biciclete. He stumbles through a TV studio that’s screening his film, with some slapstick. However, his film is interlaid with advertisements that begin to bleed into the film and change the plot, as the layers of reality blur. The desperate director must then enter his own story to try to salvage the narrative.

It has multiple nested plots, including a family in a living room watching the broadcast on their TV, paying very little attention to the chaos unfolding onscreen.

It’s a reflection on how we consume media, how we make art, the changing character of Italian cinema, and the effects that consumerism has had on these subjects.