Bread and Chocolate
Bread and Chocolate () is a 1974 Italian comedy-drama film directed by Franco Brusati. This film chronicles the misadventures of an Italian immigrant to Switzerland and is representative of the "commedia all'italiana" film genre. Plot. Like many southern Europeans of the period (1960s to early 1970s), Nino Garofalo (Nino Manfredi) is a migrant "guest worker" from Italy, working as a waiter in Switzerland. He loses his work permit when he is caught urinating in public, so he begins to lead a clandestine life in Switzerland. At first he is supported by Elena, a Greek woman and political  refugee. Then he befriends an Italian industrialist, relocated to Switzerland because of financial problems. The industrialist takes him under his wing, only to commit suicide when he squanders his last savings. Nino is constrained to find shelter with a group of clandestine Neapolitans living in a chicken coop, together with the same chickens they tend to in order to survive. Charmed by the idyllic vision of a group of young blonde Swisses, having a bath in a river, he decides to dye his hair and pass himself off as a local. In a bar, when rooting for the Italian national  football team during the broadcast of a match, he is found out after celebrating a goal scored by Fabio Capello. He is arrested and brought at a station. He meets Elena again, who wants to give him a renewed permit but he refuses. He embarks on a train and finds himself in a cabin filled with returning Italian guest workers. Amid the songs of "sun" and "sea", he is seen having second thoughts. He gets off at the first stop: better life as an illegal immigrant than a life of misery. Reception. In the "Chicago Sun-Times", film critic Roger  Ebert wrote:"Bread and Chocolate" is a sneaky comedy that winds up being serious about its subject. It reminds us of some of Chaplin's later features, and maybe it's no coincidence that the lead character looks like Chaplin. He's a Southern Italian waiter named Nino (Nino Manfredi), who goes to Switzerland to tryout for a restaurant job and finds himself caught in a net of discrimination... The only sympathy he gets comes from a neighbor (Anna Karina), a Greek immigrant who's concealing her child from the immigration authorities. Despondent, he goes into the country to find work  on a chicken farm, and the film finds its best and most unforgettable image: a chicken-coop filled with immigrant laborers, who peer with admiration and envy through chicken wire at a crowd of Swiss kids frolicking in a pool. It's here that we most completely feel the movie's underlying tension and seriousness. Other films have considered the dilemma of immigrant workers in Europe ... but not until this film by Franco Brusati has the subject been approached as a comedy.