Vieni avanti cretino (1982)

Rome. Pasquale Baudaffi is a prisoner who has just been released from Regina Coeli, the Roman prison. Waiting to greet him is his cousin Gaetano, who works at an employment office and tries to help him find an honest path back into society by offering him various jobs he can start immediately. This premise sets off a series of scenes: the work trials are linked to one another by events and incidents of various kinds. First, Baudaffi goes to a brothel he used to visit before his arrest. In the meantime, it has become a dental clinic, but he does not realize this. After registering and waiting for his turn, he has a surreal, innuendo-filled conversation with another patient, a talkative, pushy engineer with serious dental problems. The two come close to a physical altercation, and Baudaffi leaves the place shouting. On his way out of the dental clinic, he meets Don Peppino, a rough, unfamiliar priest on a pilgrimage to Rome, who mistakes him for an old childhood friend and calls him Pasquale Zagaria (a reference to Lino Banfi’s real name). Although Pasquale has never seen the priest before in his life, the two chat in a thick Apulian dialect—with Arabic subtitles—and slap each other as a strange sign of affection. Next comes an interview for a job as a municipal gamekeeper, but Pasquale, whose cousin has put in a good word for him, fails an ornithology exam: the examiner who gives him the test has been replaced by a strict young woman who despises people who get jobs through connections. His next attempt is as a garage attendant. To do the owner, who has a heart condition, a favor, Baudaffi agrees to take his place for one night, persuaded by the prospect of an enticing dinner prepared by the owner’s wife. The night ends with a group of Sicilian brothers stealing every car in the garage. They do this because they are sure their only sister, who wants to escape their control, has ended up in that very garage, hidden in one of the cars. After that, he tries working as a waiter in a bar. There, a couple in an uncertain, troubled relationship exasperate poor Pasquale. He takes their conversation to be orders for coffee and gets caught in a series of misunderstandings, while also being bullied by the bar owner’s rough manner. After this latest failed attempt, Gaetano, needing to step away for a few minutes, asks him to fill in at the employment office. There, however, Pasquale encounters a director who is intolerant of homosexuals and, because of further misunderstandings, comes to believe that Pasquale is gay—after catching him walking around the office in women’s shoes and accidentally looking into the men’s bathroom. Meanwhile, as he tries to retrieve documents that have blown out of Gaetano’s office, he ends up in a neighboring apartment, where he is mistaken for the busty woman’s secret lover and is forced to remain in his underwear at her husband’s command. Back at the offices, he wanders into the director’s room, ruins an important deal, and is thrown out in disgrace. Later, at an aristocratic party hosted by a countess, Pasquale is mistaken for a famous Spanish Gypsy tenor. He is forced to sing a serenade in which, mixing Apulian dialect with makeshift Spanish, he tells the story of his beloved, who fled from Canosa and eventually found work at a brothel. His performance is moderately successful. Shortly afterward, he performs a flamenco dance, but when he finishes on the staircase, he accidentally sets the wheelchair of the elderly noblewoman who owns the house rolling. She ends up on the buffet table, bringing the party to an end. After this latest disastrous experience, he is hired at a cybernetics factory, where he encounters a nervous, agitated director plagued by tics: Dr. Tomas. Pasquale is assigned repetitive, mind-numbing tasks that drive him to lose his temper, until he causes the factory’s machinery to go haywire. Now resigned to living as a vagrant, Pasquale spots a newspaper notice about a lost little dog named Nerone, whom he happens to find. Baudaffi hopes the discovery will earn him a substantial cash reward, but from the dog’s aristocratic, widowed owner, the overweight Palmira, he gets only sex. The film closes with the director Luciano Salce himself appearing to judge Banfi’s performance: the actor is sentenced to be shot by a firing squad, which turns out to be armed with cream pies.