Winner of the Golden Globe (Italian equivalent of the Golden Globes) for best comedy in 2020, Tolo Tolo swept over six million Italians into cinemas when it was released the same year. And despite such success, it took two years for this satire of the European migrant crisis to land here. To believe that the film had to make the crossing by swimming, clandestinely, to reach us across the Atlantic. And if the method was the same as his hero, then it’s a miracle…
This hero is Checco. Pure Italian product from the head to the Prada moccasins, this entrepreneur who lives his dreams big with the money of others – in this case, that of his relatives – opens a sushi restaurant in his native village in Puglia. Held by his hands maestro, the restaurant is of course bankrupt quickly. Checco flees to Africa in order to escape the debt collectors, while leaving his people with the generous addition of his ambitions. He gets hired as a waiter in a luxury hotel, where he befriends his colleague Oumar and falls in love with Idjaba. But now a conflict between an armed group and the authorities breaks out. Checco finds himself having to flee to Europe with his two colleagues and becomes, ironically, an illegal immigrant.
Checco Zalone, a newcomer to the circle of directors, is an illustrious unknown in our latitudes. On the other hand, in the homeland of Gucci, we no longer present the actor, humorist and musician who has been making Italians hair their hair for a few years already. The one who made a name for himself with his character as an uneducated and uninhibited hillbilly from the south (his stage name, Checco Zalone, would mean in the dialect of Puglia: “What a big colon!”) saw big for his first feature film by wanting make us laugh at the humanitarian drama of the European migration crisis.
vitriolic criticism
Provocative at heart, he dares everything. Up to an aquatic ballet of migrants adrift in the middle of the Mediterranean. Except that the Rital proves wrong the adage invented by the screenwriter Michel Audiard: “The idiots, it dares everything. That’s why we even recognize them. Because the Checco behind the camera has more in the cigar than his alter ego in front and strafs intelligently through each gag. He cuts a suit — Armani, of course — for all the well-meaning and hypocritical elites, the rich, the politicians heavy with courage like an empty ballot box, the “reporters of human misery” who go more to meet their ego than the populations of the world and, it should be specified, to Western imperialist tourists. Everyone takes it severely for their rank, for the better and for laughs.
Let’s give Caesar what is Caesar’s all the same, because all the credit does not go to Zalone alone. Indeed, not silly for a lyre, he joined on the writing of the scenario a ponte: the filmmaker Paolo Virzi, incidentally Silver Lion in Venice in 1997 for Ovosodo. The duo is aptly betting on self-mockery and a vitriolic humor that dispenses a good train of gags bordering on the absurd and of which, something rare enough to be noticed, the majority are indeed funny. Playing on the predictability of this type of scenario, they manage to catch us off guard until the last minutes of the film.
On the visual side, Zalone was right in digging the gap between content and form. The new director uses, even abuses aesthetic aerial shots straight out of a tourist advertisement, adding to the comedy of the situation served by the scenario. The photography is neat, the framing judicious, one would almost applaud. What a pity that the use of green funds is not as technically successful! The idea was however well found. We regret that this weakness was not offset by an additional dose of creativity, he signs Zalone doesn’t seem to miss.
A little less also on the performance of the actors, which sometimes lacks credibility. Checco Zalone, for his first director, is doing honorably well in spite of everything by succeeding in a light comedy, with delicate criticism like a headbutt from Zidane on Materazzi and as scandalous as it is funny.