Bread and Tulips

When fortyish housewife Rosalba is separated from family and friends on a coach tour of the south, she decides, while hitching home to Pescara, to see Venice, just for 24 hours. It becomes more than a break from routine; missing her train home, she’s lent a sofa by a friendly but taciturn Icelandic waiter, and the next day, on a whim, she takes a job at an anarchist florist’s. Meanwhile, hubby’s having fits, even hiring a crime fiction-crazy plumber to find her… A midlife romantic fable less firmly rooted in reality than the faintly dowdy characters might suggest, this benefits from the charisma of both Licia Maglietta as the unlikely princess awaiting liberation and Bruno Ganz as her pedantic yet poetic host. It’s fluff and nonsense, obviously, with misjudged dream sequences and broad comic scenes; still, it sidesteps gross sentimentality while displaying affection for its characters. Old-fashioned, a little wayward, improbably likeable.