Lezioni di cioccolato (2007)

Perugia, 2007. Mattia Cavedoni is an unscrupulous man, a surveyor who owns a small construction company and is always trying to save money. With the help of his site foreman, Osvaldo, he chooses shoddy materials and skips safety measures. To get the attention of the arrogant Dr. Ugolini, Mattia joins the same golf club and offers to renovate Ugolini’s son’s country farmhouse for half the price quoted by the other companies. One day, Kamal Hawasgwaibh, one of Mattia’s recently arrived workers, employed off the books in the hope of earning some money and settling in Italy, has an accident on the site, falling from the farmhouse roof. Cavedoni had not had scaffolding installed there in order to save money. Kamal breaks both arms, but Mattia is not concerned; he only begs the worker not to tell the police, or he will be forced to shut down the site. Kamal tells him that he was a pastry chef in Egypt and says he will not report him only if Mattia takes his place, under a false identity, in the pastry-making course at Perugina that Kamal had enrolled in to learn how to use chocolate in pastries, since that ingredient is not used in Egypt. The course’s final competition requires the creation of an innovative chocolate. The winner will receive funding to open a chocolate shop as part of Perugina’s centenary celebrations. Prompted by Kamal, Mattia adopts his customs and mannerisms—from his clothes and cellphone to his car and way of speaking—and reluctantly begins attending the course. Eventually, the middle-aged master chocolatier Gaetano Conti (whose teenage daughters are mistaken for his girlfriends) realizes that the “new” Kamal does not have a pastry chef’s skill. But moved by the story of exploitation the fake Kamal tells him, he does not expel him from the course and assigns him to the lovely student Cecilia Ferri, from Frascati, so that she can tutor him. From that point on, the two get to know each other better and better. She becomes increasingly attracted to the fake Kamal, while at first he thinks she is hysterical and tries to get her to do his assignments for him. He starts calling her Ceci and discovers her vulnerabilities, stemming from a past scarred by relationships with men who always turned out to be liars. This leads her to fall in love, and Mattia, too, in the guise of the fake Kamal, soon succumbs to the charms of his lovely tutor. After overhearing the fake Kamal’s phone calls, Cecilia mistakenly thinks Ugolini is his employer and is exploiting him. She decides to confront him and berates him, accusing him of exploiting the fake Kamal. Ugolini flees indignantly, without understanding what Cecilia is talking about. Meanwhile, realizing she has fallen in love with the fake Kamal and not wanting to get involved in another relationship that she believes will end in heartbreak, Cecilia decides to leave the course and goes to the station to return to Frascati. The master chocolatier then tells the fake Kamal that Cecilia is leaving and says that if she leaves the course, he will be expelled too. The fake Kamal rushes to the station and manages to persuade Cecilia to stay. But Mattia and Kamal’s ruse cannot last forever: Mattia is exposed at the chocolate school by Dr. Ugolini, who has come as a doctor to give a lecture on the beneficial properties of chocolate. Cecilia thus discovers that yet another man has lied to her. After a very tense confrontation, Mattia tries to explain the situation and why he was forced to lie. Disappointed, he goes to the real Kamal to give him the bad news. Devastated at being excluded from the competition, Kamal gets drunk with Mattia to drown his sorrows (so it turns out Kamal does sometimes drink wine, too). Having come to recognize the way he has been working, Mattia changes his ways and tells Ugolini that if he wants quality work, he has to pay a fair price. The film ends after the real Kamal asks to be allowed to take the course’s final exam after all. With good-hearted Mattia as his laborer, Kamal manages to take part and win the prize money to open the chocolate shop, with an Italian-Egyptian “kiss” chocolate made with dates and hazelnuts called “I Love Shamira” (Kamal’s wife). Outdone in the exam, Cecilia watches the young Mattia fall at her feet, apologizing for everything he has done and declaring his sincere feelings for her. Her answer is not entirely negative: she tells him that she has accepted a consulting job at Perugina that will keep her in the city for a few more months, letting Mattia understand that there may still be a chance for them.