Western
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Given our extreme isolationism–in some ways perhaps even greater today than it was half a century ago–it’s logical that we tend to think of foreigners in stereotypical terms. After all, we have so little information and experience to draw on, and it’s symptomatic of the problem that we often think of non-Americans as wannabe Americans even though many of them clearly aren’t. So we wind up thinking about much of the rest of the world in shorthand; communists are nonreligious, the French worship Jerry Lewis, Iranian artists are heavily censored, the Chinese love fortune cookies. In fact, there are plenty of religious communists, Woody Allen is much more popular in France than Jerry Lewis, Iranians tend to revere artists more than we do, and Chinese fortune cookies are strictly for non-Chinese. But such data offer only fleeting clues about what we don’t know, and without more information they serve only as counterstereotypes–they hardly provide a comprehensive understanding of these cultures.
Paco is a shoe salesman only when the film opens. He picks up Nino as a hitchhiker, and shortly afterward Nino steals his car. Paco loses his job as a consequence, and when by chance he catches Nino on the street, he beats him up so badly that Nino has to spend a week in the hospital. Over a three-week period the two become road buddies, while Marinette (Elisabeth Vitali), a woman Paco met after his car was stolen, tries to decide whether to stay with him. Paco is seen as a skillful ladies’ man while Nino repeatedly strikes out with women, though this shorthand description is eventually undermined, as are some other assumptions about these people. Two of their more entertaining activities along the way are a fake public opinion poll about what constitutes the “ideal man,” concocted with the idea of finding Nino a girlfriend, and a game called “Good morning, France” that consists of greeting French pedestrians from cafe tables and scoring points on the basis of whether the greetings are returned.
