Movie about gigolo sparks row

2009-12-28 19:02

Rome - A lowbrow Christmas movie has sparked an unholy row in Italy after winning special arthouse status that entitles the makers to tax breaks.

Italy has produced some of the most acclaimed and influential films of the last 100 years, and there is outrage that Christmas in Beverly Hills has been given the "national and cultural interest" label.

The film recounts an unlikely reunion in Los Angeles between Cristina and Carlo, who abandoned her when she was pregnant 17 years earlier and now works as a gigolo.

It has proved a hit at the box office, taking €14m since it was released on December 18.

But a prominent columnist at the Corriere della Sera newspaper, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, said the film was "an uninterrupted stream of vulgarity peppered with swearwords, a feature-length obscenity like you might find scrawled on the wall of a station toilet".

The lead actor Christian De Sica - whose father directed the 1948 great The Bicycle Thieves, hailed as one of the great Italian postwar movies - defended his film in the same newspaper on Monday.

He said successful films like Christmas in Beverly Hills had no need of public money and in fact supported the rest of Italian cinema.
 

- SAPA