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Trailer: Where Am I Going?
Checco is born on the privileged side of life in an Italian small town, with a guaranteed job as a public servant. When a new reformist government vows to cut down on bureaucracy, Checco is forced to accept worsening conditions.
![Destination unknown ... Eleonara Giovanardi and Luca Medici in <i>Where Am I Going</i>?](/web/20161014145517im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/0/g/p/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs0guc.png/1476322500337.jpg)
★★★½
Michael Moore's recent polemical documentary Where to Invade Next found Moore marvelling without irony at the perks granted to Italian workers, including extended paid holidays and bonuses at Christmas. Reportedly the highest-grossing Italian film of all time, Gennaro Nunziante's Where Am I Going? paints the situation in a less positive light.
The film is a vehicle for its co-writer Checco Zalone (real name Luca Medici) an established Italian comic star – a balding, snaggle-toothed, wide-eyed fellow in early middle age with a cheerfully insensitive manner and a comic style somewhere between a crasser Woody Allen and a tamer Sacha Baron Cohen.
Like Allen, he plays a cowardly, hyper-verbal everyman whose wisecracks serve to defend his own mediocrity and cowardice. Like Cohen, he traffics in risky material, with a penchant for racial stereotypes not always sufficiently shielded by irony. The framing device here finds him telling his story to a cartoonishly portrayed group of African tribespeople with body paint and spears, aiming to justify his existence to avoid being slaughtered.
Checco, we learn, has spent his adult life in a cushy job in the Italian public service, giving him a licence to idle at work while behaving like a chauvinist pig at home. When cutbacks put an end to this idyll, he's dispatched on a mission to the Arctic, but falls on his feet when he meets the beautiful Valeria (Eleonora Giovanardi), a freethinking scientist who wins his heart. Accompanying her back to Norway, he reinvents himself as a sensitive new age guy – until nostalgia starts to kick in, and he's forced to choose between the old life and the new.
Like most popular comedy, Where Am I Going? is designed for local consumption rather than export. But even if some of the finer points of the satire have been lost in translation, it's not hard to see why the film has been a success: it's fast-paced, colourful and silly, with enough jokes to ensure that if one doesn't hit the next one will.
What's striking to an outsider is how the point of view evades simple labels of left and right. Italian bureaucracy is roundly mocked, with Checco's dependence on the public purse seen as equivalent to a refusal to grow up. Valeria's independence is also mined for somewhat tacky laughs – she has three children, whose fathers are all of different nationalities – but the suggestion remains that Italy has something to learn from socially progressive Scandinavia.