Tutti Contro Tutti

In Rolando Ravello’s first film, Tutti Contro Tutti, a poor family struggles to find a decent place to live just as poor people always have and always will, rich people don’t do very much to help them, and the legal system doesn’t always work.

It’s a strange scenario for a comedy, and though it’s not a hilarious knee slapper, it’s clever and entertaining. Agostino and Anna along with their two children and their in-laws are celebrating. Agostino’s son has just made his first communion and they’ve all headed home for the party. At the doorstep, covered dishes in tow, nobody’s key is working in the lock; but why?

Turns out, during the family’s two-hour absence, another family has broken into their house, changed the locks, and taken possession of their home. This is possible, in part, because the man they’ve been paying rent to isn’t the real owner of the building and they have no real proof that the place is theirs.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from watching Italian movies it’s that Rome has a housing problem, and if Ravello had kept it simple and told that story, he might have had a real gem of a movie, but he just couldn’t stop when he was ahead. I would have been singing the praises of a comedy in which a family gets locked out of their own house and with cunning and sly plots gets it back; that part was good. Ravello had some pontificating to do and that’s where he made a couple of bad turns.

This is the story of underdogs winning, that’s always fun, and I wish Ravello had let them having their winning moment without using the film as a platform to condemn every bad guy he could think of; the church, the police, racists, the nouveau riche, school bullies, and even crooked southern Italians. Maybe he thought he’d never have another chance to make another movie and he thought he’d better get it all into this one.

Starring Rolando Ravello, Kasia Smutniak, Stefano Altieri and Marco Giallini, Tutti Contro Tutti is full of laughs and on the whole very enjoyable just the same. He makes some very good points about the importance of home, and what happens to a family that doesn’t have one.