Ladrões de Sabonete

This movie is not supposed to make you laugh. Nor is it merely a parody of "The Bicycle Thief". It is a meditation on the way Contemporary Italian Directors are treated, or mistreated, in current-day Italy. It is also a reflection of how these film directors are Intellectual shunned by "Intellectual" film critics in favor of more time honored classics such as "The Bicycle Thief" and also how films are treated by the Television Companies, which produce or co-produce most modern Italian films. Personally, I think it's a great and bizarre film which owes alot to Fellini's 8 1/2. the way the three worlds in the film begin to inter-weave is very clever. If you like weird movies that trancend meta-levels, See this now!

A somewhat self-important film director attends a TV studio where his latest film, The Icicle Thief, is to be shown as part of an arts programme. During transmission, loud colour commercials constantly interrupt the sombre black and white film, frustrating the director. A power failure results in a strange fusion where he enters the world of his film which itself has fused with the commercials that have been relentlessly interrupting it.

This Italian comedy is the brain child of Maurizio Nichetti who not only plays a dual role of the film director and star of the movie-within-a-movie, but also directs the film proper as well as co-wrote the thing. So quite a labour of love and an impressive achievement. The movie operates I guess in three distinct ways – as a parody of the film The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Italian neo-realism in general, a satirical assessment of commercialism vs art and lastly as an inventive bit of imaginative cinema where three worlds merge together. The worlds of course are the 'real' world of the TV studio and households watching television, the world of the movie itself and lastly the world of the commercials. It's an idea which is executed very nicely with some fun cross-references between the realities which allows for a few amusing observations. It's an idea which was used in Woody Allen's earlier The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) but Nichetti definitely takes the concept further and makes more of it. Overall, this is an amusing, inventive and clever bit of comedy.

Maurizio Nichetti is a talented director, writer and actor in Italy. The film is not just a spoof of the depressing Neorealist "Ladri di Biciclette", but also a satire on the media in the republic. The majority of Italian films are funded by television channels such as the Rai and Mediaset. By jeopardizing the financing of this film by taking out a bitter swipe at the film's revenue source.

He also makes a powerful comment on the portrayal of women in Italian films of both the 1940s and 1980s. Nichetti deserves more credit for this film than he seems to have received.

Overall, however, it is very funny and intelligent the way that the spectator forms part of the film. It is not an escapist film.

Film buffs with fond memories of Vittorio de Sica's post-war Italian Neo-realist masterpiece 'Ladri di Biciclette' won't want to miss Maurizio Nichetti's clever parody, in which the director himself is shown presenting his own homage to Neo-realism on Italian TV. The gimmick is that the movie within the movie is at first interrupted and then overwhelmed by garish television commercials, prompting Nichetti to enter his own film so he can salvage the narrative: not an easy task, since after a glimpse of consumer heaven his characters are reluctant to return to post-war Roman poverty. Nichetti manages to lampoon everything from pompous film critics to inappropriate commercial programming to (with affection) highbrow film pretensions, but his plea for cinematic integrity has its own crazy logic. And he certainly knows his sources, showing more than a touch of Chaplin in the black and white film-within-the-film and borrowing mannerisms from Woody Allen in the modern framing story. Favorite ongoing gag: the trouble-prone baby who can't resist playing with carving knives, electric light sockets, and so forth.

A fun takeoff on the serious drama of "The Bicycle Thief." The film contrasts the intense, self-centered film director; his characters, who are just trying to make things turn out more pleasantly for themselves; the ideal and imaginary people we see in commercials; and the people in the television audience who see any film chopped up into bits that fit around commercials and other station business.

A film critic who uses the notes he prepared for another film tries to evaluate and analyze the film the television program is playing (titled "The Icicle Thief"), while the director in the studio sputters in disbelief. The characters in the melodramatic black-and-white film are stuck in drudgery and dispair until the fantasy characters in the commercials start to enter their lives. The audience, represented by a typical family, just looks at the screen whenever there is nothing better to do, while the television program chatters on in their mundane existence. Could this be us? Could this be you?