From December 1st to January 1st, with repeat screenings through January 7th, Casa del Cinema will host the film series titled “Tutti a Tavola”, featuring fourteen films, from comedy to drama, from noir to animation, in which the pleasure, the rituals and the excesses of food, conviviality and the tangle of ties between dinner guests play a significant role within the narrative. The cycle will be inaugurated on Sunday December 1st at 8 pm by La grande abbuffata, one of Marco Ferreri’s absolute masterpieces, founded on a brilliant paradox: stuffing one’s self with food until one achieves self-destruction to demonstrate that the void in life can never be filled.
The journey through time of “Tutti a tavola” starts in 1948 with Rope by Alfred Hitchcock, a masterly essay on filmmaking set in a narrow sliver of time and space (a reception organised by two young murderers in their apartment) and continues into the 1950s with Miseria e nobiltà, starring a memorable Totò who stuffs his mouth directly at the kitchen table, and Lily and the Tramp, with the two stars exchanging a loving kiss as they share a plate of spaghetti.
The series then moves into the 1970s and 80s offering viewers The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a masterpiece by Luis Buñuel, Murder by Death by Robert Moore with an unforgettable cast starring the outstanding Peter Sellers and Peter Falk, Babette’s Feast by Gabriel Axel inspired by a short story by Karen Blixen, and Il minestrone by Sergio Citti, starring Roberto Benigni, Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli and Giorgio Gaber.
The programme then moves into the 90’s and 2000s, with The Dinner (La cena) by Ettore Scola, a remarkable intergenerational portrait set in the trattoria “Arturo al portico”, Gosford Park by Robert Altman, who films his own personal reinterpretation of an Agatha Chrtistie-type mystery, Ratatouille by Brad Bird, one of Pixar’s most famous films, with the mouse Rémy who dreams of becoming a great chef, and Beauty and the Beast by Gary Trousdale, perhaps the most refined, baroque and sensual of the great Disney classics.
The series ends with two films from the finest contemporary Italian cinema: A Quiet Life (Una vita tranquilla) by Claudio Cupellini, a surprising and original noir, and Perfect Strangers (Perfetti Sconosciuti) by Paolo Genovese, who builds an absolutely perfect narrative mechanism, set within the limited time of a dinner among friends.