Benvenuti al Sud (2010), an Italian remake of Dany Boon’s Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, treats the same topic—the social prejudices and stereotypes rooted in a country’s historical north-south divide—with a nearly identical plot and style.
It follows Milanese family man Alberto, a fastidious middle-manager employed by the Italian postal service who, through a series of ridiculous blunders, is sent to work in a small coastal town near Naples. When transplanted to Italy, the socio-geo construct turns on a reversal of that in Boon’s film: whereas Southern France is considered a civilized, even coveted Mediterranean paradise in Bienvenue (Northern France suffering dreary climes and proximity to distasteful, barbaric ways), the reverse is true for Benvenuti. Here, Milan, Turin, and their respective regions are the seats of civilization, industry, and progress, with Southern Italy the land of rough land laborers, poor manners, and unchecked criminality.
Benvenuti relies heavily on reciprocal misperceptions, with an emphasis on northern prejudices toward southerners, to deliver the lion’s share of its comedic value. While preparing for his dreaded journey, Alberto decides to leave behind his watch and wedding ring, given the thieves he’s sure to encounter. He packs body armor, which he wears to bed on his first night in a southern home as a guest of his younger colleague and soon-to-be friend, Mattia. Later, in an attempt to assimilate, Alberto dramatically tosses his garbage out the window onto the street below, having heard from a fellow northerner that this is how southerners do things. And so on.
To establish Alberto’s thoroughly Milanese character, before his departure he is seen attending a meeting of the Illustre Accademia del Gorgonzola, a masonic-like brotherhood devoted to the quintessentially Milanese cheese. (Italy is, in fact, home to many such food societies, complete with rituals shrouded in secrecy and strict hierarchies, modeled on the medieval confraternity.) During the meeting, a brother warns Alberto about the various dangers in the South, from its shoddily built houses to its ubiquitous truck drivers. Most dangerous of all though is the food, a threat on par with the sickening pollution. The scene introduces a theme that will underpin the rest of the film: the power of food to both divide and unite culturally dissimilar groups.
The first morning in his new home, Alberto breakfasts with Mattia and Mattia’s mother. Insisting on something light (coffee and dry toast), Alberto is instead offered the sweet egg cream zabaione and a homemade pastry filled with chocolate and pig’s blood. Underlying this humorous (albeit exaggerated) portrayal of contrasting eating styles is a graver topic, however—poverty versus abundance. In the historically poorer Italian South, abundance on the table in the form of richer homemade foods and larger portions is highly significant, while the abstemious, temperate foodways of the “civilized” North reflect a distinct historical privilege. Tellingly, Alberto’s own eating habits evolve alongside his developing friendships as he’s presented with opportunities that dissolve his former taste intolerance.
Charmed by the natural beauty of the area (filming took place in Castellabate, located south of Salerno amid Cilento National Park), friendships, and repeated invitations to dine and socialize with locals, Alberto progresses over the course of his two-year sojourn from a rigid, anxious man hindered more than he realizes by his trace xenophobia to a playful, relaxed man who is clearly happy and confident in his new element. In a scene indicative of his changing nature, he decides to join in the football match in the piazza just outside his post office—something he’d previously shunned as work-shy and inappropriate. Though a bit heavy-handed and predictable, and certainly guilty of perpetuating more than a few hackneyed comedy tropes, Benvenuti al Sud offers many pleasing moments in which our protagonist’s stodgy nature is enlivened, and arguably upgraded, through unlikely friendships.
Benvenuti also achieves something audiences have come rather increasingly to expect (à la the current genre-blurring era of Netflix original series): a bridging of the gap between comic frivolous and tragic serious, facilitating edification for viewers in the guise of lighter-side entertainment. While Alberto’s errors in judgment evoke conventional comedic twinges of shame, his journey presents him with much loftier moments in which we see him thoughtfully reassessing his own bias. Ostensibly Benvenuti al Sud strives to make us laugh by exposing the folly of these specific Italian v. Italian stereotypes, and indeed it works hard to do this with its comedy. Yet in the dismantling of Alberto’s prejudices—prejudices that in Italian reality are very serious—we witness a character’s hopeful metamorphosis.
The final scene of Benvenuti is refreshingly poignant, particularly within the otherwise cringey, hyper-cosmetic Italian comedy realm, yet at the same time feels somehow antithetical (ppov) to its own message. As the friends say their farewells, Alberto’s wife Silvia leans towards the visibly pregnant belly of her southern counterpart, Mattia’s now-wife Maria, to welcome il terroncello, or baby southerner, a diminutive derived from the infamous Italian pejorative, terrone. In turn, Maria responds, Ciao, polentona! referencing a common label for northerners, especially Milanese, for whom polenta is a staple. While the latter term draws from the ubiquitous use of food-rooted ethnic slurs to express racist ideology (English speakers will recognize terms like kraut, frog, and beaney, to name a few), it is a far slighter comment than the significant insult terrone, a word loaded with layers of systemic racism and classism, and the complex legacy that comes with that.
Though delivered affectionately, the exchange continues the film’s relentless reliance on divisive stereotypes for humor, just at the moment we expect something more, something akin to a true rejection of such language, and I admit my dismay here the first time I watched Benvenuti. After subsequent viewings, however, I began to see the scene as a reminder of what has been at stake throughout—changing minds via comedy is a tall order, after all—as well as what has been achieved. Having upended at least a few of the damaging perceptions Benvenuti seeks to address, perhaps it has earned the right to conclude on its own comedic terms.
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