I left this movie with mixed feelings but the bad impression prevailed. There are too many artificial elements in the story to make it a good movie. First of all the plot. It isn´t very elaborated, too constructed and sometimes even obvious sloppy. Two examples. At the beginning we see Rosalba in a sightseeing-bus. The bus stops at a road-house for a short rest and then the bus leaves without her. Her husband detects that she is missing, calls her and tells her to wait until the bus returns. Now I knew from the previews that she will make her own way and I wondered by which means the movie will achieve this. The answer was astonishing simple. There is a rough cut and all the sudden we find her sitting in a strange car without any convincing explanation, why she changed her mind. Another minor but typical detail. Later a detective tries to find her in Venice. Eventually he finds her and they meet. He gets a telephone call and she sneaks away. He follows her and leaves his suitcase behind. But you never get to know how he now makes his way without his suitcase. Secondly the characters. O.K., I know this is a comedy so you don´t have to expect any kind of Ingmar Bermann characters and relationships but do they have to be THAT shallow? The main character Rosalba reminds me of Jackie Brown, a woman in her 40s, still attractive (a rather showy camera-movement along Rosalba´s body at the beginning is employed to overemphasize this) but frustrated with her life. But while Jackie Brown changes her life through responding to the circumstances in a natural, convincing and exciting way, which emerge from the story alone, for Rosalba there are a lot of extraneous details used. Like her accordion-playing, knowing how to work with flowers and so on. Another characteristic example is the florist by whom she works. He is a little odd, but that´s it. You can´t take him as a real person. The ending is like you expected it right away, but it is too achieved in a rude way, as if the writers thought, well this has to be that way but why it becomes this way we don´t really care. This is all the more unsatisfactory than there are some good details. The camera-work especially in Fernando´s apartment is great, I liked Bruno Ganz acting very much and there were nice scenes when Rosalba talked with her son. But this isn´s enough for a thoroughly good comedy.
Review of Bread and Tulips
