The Italian boor hits the box office

Checco Zalone's change of skin, from the average man who dreams of opulence to the billionaire heir of Buen Camino, has made many turn up their noses. The Apulian comedian, who had found the high road of the politically incorrect in the qualunquist, regionalist, macho and homophobic quisque de populo, seemed to have slipped into the cliché of the loudmouthed, ignorant, boorish man who loves to show off his opulence.

A character that, keeping us not too far back in time, triumphed in the cinepanettoni, such as cumenda Camillo Zampetti (Guido Nicheli) in Carlo Vanzina's Vacanze di Natale (1983) who jumped the queue at the reception of the Cristallo hotel in Cortina by bribing the staff: "You shoot yourself off a three hundred thousand and you're in the butter for the whole holiday". Then there was Cetto La Qualunque of Giulio Manfredonia's Qualunquemente (2011) who dressed shamelessly like the protagonist of Buen Camino. Except that in Cetto's case the clothes, like everything he touched, were the fruit of the underground economy (an allusion to a receipt paralyses the film), whereas in Zalone's the clothes are from fashion houses with immaculate fiscal conduct and the money squandered is hard and honestly earned. But not by him. Checco too, like Camillo and Cetto, bribes, but not to gain more power and thus money, but for personal reasons.

In the five years he spent away from the big screen, after the lonely, do-gooder downturn of Tolo Tolo, Zalone re-established his partnership with Gennaro Nunziante, with whom he shot four of his five films, and together they came up with a different mask: the ignorant, proud 50-year-old, second-generation rich man, close to the aesthetics of heir-entrepreneurs, with millions of followers, whose life is a showcase of exclusive luxury. In spite of divergent criticism, Buen camino was a smash hit: in less than a month, the film broke all Italian box office records with over 71 million, surpassing Avatar.

Luca Medici, 47, according to the data that broke down the audience, has a hard core in the fifty-plus bracket (almost 40%), especially in his generation (the average age is 41.5), with little gender difference (53% male, 47% female). With Buen camino he has broadened the horizon of his fans even further, while accentuating his sociological and, therefore, political outlook. Last Wednesday, data from the Oxfam report, presented in Davos, confirmed Zaloni's intuition: the gap between rich and poor is growing and, in the case of Italy, two-thirds of wealth comes from inheritance. And while reality with the Greenland issue surpasses fiction, Checco recounts a world in which everything can be bought. It is taking it too seriously, one will say, but the cinema's task is to sniff out changes in society and that of comedy is to flog them.

Zalone on the news, in his own way, has always been there: in Cado dalle nubi (2009) he mocked the League, but it served more to reinforce the southern male coterie to the core. He touched rose-water on the theme of international terrorism in That Fine Day (2011), mocked radical chic in Sunshine (2013), so much so that the right wing is now claiming Zalone as its own. But he also touched on the theme of work with the idolisation of the fixed job in his previous box-office hit (€65,365,736) Quo vado?. With Buen camino Zalone has surpassed himself and continues because the figures show that it is not just a matter of filling an afternoon during the holidays to distract from the constant wars and international tensions. The film has conquered provincial multiplexes and city theatres, from North to South, leading the way for other films, because those who had lost their way in the theatres are once again interested in the big screen.