The raw holiday classics from Italy are not your standard films
On a recent evening at the Hotel de la Poste, a mountain hotel in Cortina D’Ampezzo, Italy’s most ski-and-go winter destination, a raucous party celebrated the birth of a cinematic era.
Forty years earlier, the salacious comedy “Christmas Holiday,” set at the lodge, was released. Nominally about an austere but happily adulterous piano bar singer and the wealthy Milanese, salt-of-the-earth Romans and tuxedo-clad bon vivants who surround him, the film gave a taste of decades of gleefully vulgar , broad and formal Christmas comedies that deserved a lot of attention. fortune and became known, after the pies that Italians devour during the season, as ‘Cinema Panettone’.
To celebrate the anniversary, the film’s producer, writer and stars carved a huge panettone the size of a fire hydrant and took part in a weekend of cinepanettone-themed festivities.
Revelers in furs, sequins and ski sweaters reading “Cortina” or “Mountains and Champagne,” dancing to “Dance All Nite,”Maracaibo‘ and other Italian classics from the 80s on the film’s soundtrack. They sang along with the main character from the film during a raucous cabaret performance. They took to the slopes and ran down a slalom, trying to finish a piece of panettone before reaching the finish line.
“He’s still chewing,” shouted Chiara Caliceti, the weekend’s presenter. “He actually ate the panettone!”
Cloying Hallmark Christmas movies set in European cities may be all the rage this year, but in Italy they don’t come anywhere close to the cultural juggernaut that cinema panettone once was.
For three decades, the movies dominated the Christmas season – until their stars aged, streaming platforms took over and the tastes and economics of the industry changed. They were never considered suitable for consumption abroad, but were intended for fans who cherished a piece of Italian culture during the hedonistic and carefree turn of the century. For critics, however, they reflected the consumerism and showgirl sexism of the Silvio Berlusconi era, which, like a shameful secret, was better kept within the family.
A decade after the films reached their conclusion, producers and fans are trying to capitalize on nostalgia and rehabilitate them as cult classics that celebrate Italy’s love for cuckolding high jinks, toilet humor and the folkloric swearing that comes when Italians come out of the closet. elevated it to an art form. Different classes and regions collide.
‘The intellectuals keep telling us that they are accessible. It’s low, but they don’t understand it: they’re low on purpose,” said Claudio Cecchetto, 71, an Italian music producer who chaired the hotel’s dance party. “These are super intelligent people who decided to go low. People just want to have fun. I mean, what the hell.”
‘Christmas Holiday’, which many middle-aged Italians can quote by heart, was followed by ‘Christmas Holiday’ (1990, 1991, 1995 and 2000). The films were often set in Cortina and featured guests from different parts of Italy. to curse each other and court each other in ski lodges.
The 2000s marked a move to exotic locales – Christmas in Rio, India, South Africa and New York – often offering an array of physical gags, sophomoric parodies, bare breasts and racial stereotypes. Released in 2002, ‘Christmas on the Nile’ is considered by connoisseurs to be the pinnacle – or depth – of the genre. It included a mummy-wrap-as-toilet-paper gag. In 2009, screens were forced reserved for ‘Christmas in Beverly Hills’ ‘Avatar’ postpones its arrival in Italian theaters.
“They are designed for communal viewing,” says Alan O’Leary, professor of film studies and author of the book “Phenomenology of Cinemapanettone”, who said they were purposefully broad to attract and separate generations of Italian families who went to the movies together after Christmas.
He said the exaggerated portrayal of regional archetypes in a relatively young and fragmented country was a continuation of the work of ‘telling Italians they are Italians’, and particularly reflected the Italian Christmas carnivalesque period of indulging in things.
No matter how far the cinema panettone films traveled, Cortina D’Ampezzo, with its icy streets lined with a luxury shopping center of brands (Rolex, Moncler, Fendi, Fendi Kids), is always considered his ancestral home. Over a weekend in December, the city that will host part of the 2026 Olympics became, for many, the Olympics of Italian junk.
In a quiet corner of the hotel bar, waiters in white coats attended to Aurelio De Laurentiis, the powerful producer of “Christmas Holiday” and the more than thirty Panettone feature films that followed. His assistant and everyone else called him ‘il presidente’ because he was the president and owner of the Naples football club. After a plate of pasta, he walked across the room to shoot a promotional spot for a one-day theatrical re-release of the film on Saturday, but the camera lights kept flickering, causing him to start over repeatedly.
Back at his corner table, he said the “historical” films depicted Italy at the time, when Mr Berlusconi conquered the country. Mr. De Laurentiis said the films were successful because they were essentially “instant” films that rolled off a cinematic conveyor belt, and that he quit after 30 years because there were no more exotic locations, and he was distracted by his football team. Unlike those who say sexist excesses aren’t possible today, he thought this was exactly what the joyless post-#MeToo era needed.
He said he would like to try making such a movie, suggesting a crude and vulgar name for a #MeToo holiday movie.
“This could be a good title for a movie,” he said, explaining that the film would be “based on sincerity.”
Mr. De Laurentiis, pleased with himself, asked his assistant what he thought of the proposed title.
“Bellissimo,” said the assistant.
Jerry Calà, who played the role of the horny piano bar player in the 1983 film, also lamented that “this politically correct moment destroys the comedy.” He said that young people were rediscovering panettone films precisely because they craved violations of bad taste.
But the screenwriter of the original film, Enrico Vanzina, rejected the label “cinema panettone” for the 1980s Christmas films he worked on, which he said, after a period of surrealism, were based on real and showy Italian life.
Mr. Vanzina comes from a family of filmmakers. His late brother directed the original “Christmas Holiday,” and his father, better known as Steno, directed some of the most beloved comedies of the golden age of Italian cinema known as La Commedia all’Italiana.
During a panel discussion in the shadow of the giant panettone, Mr. Vanzina gushed as Lucia Borgonzoni, the right-wing Secretary of State for Culture, appeared on video feed to pay tribute to the “famous cinema panettone I grew up with.”
“I was pissed,” Mr Vanzina, who has long white hair, said of the official’s ode, who deleted all references to film panettone in a later written statement.
Taking over a table reserved for bottle service, Mr. Vanzina — like many Italians — argued that these are the films Italians really loved. He said they came from the great tradition of Italian comedies, including “Holiday Vacation,” a 1959 film also set in Cortina and starring Vittorio De Sica, the great Italian director of neorealist masterpieces, and the father of Christian De Sica , king of the cinema panettone films.
“It’s not La Commedia all’Italiana, it’s its degeneration,” says Teresa Marchesi, a film critic at the left-wing newspaper Domani. She said that as movie ticket prices rose and the general public stopped going to theaters regularly, the films applied an equation of vulgarities, slapstick and skin to appeal to a lucrative market of poor families who could splurge at Christmas.
She said cinema panettone took off when Berlusconi and his television channels eroded Italian values and offered a new “political and cultural model” of success measured in opulent wealth and plump arm candy. “It is absolutely not a mirror of Italianity – it is a projection,” she said. “It’s his Bunga Bunga, done in film.”
That festive atmosphere permeated the Hotel de la Poste, where fans paid hundreds of euros per plate for a dinner and concert by Mr. Calà.
“’Maracaibo’!” the crowd screamed and begged for their favorite no-holds-barred party song.
‘Maracaibo’ is at the end,” Mr. Calà said, a guitar hanging from his shoulder. “Don’t break my balls, okay?”
Mr. Calà, who suffered a heart attack this year, ran through the campy canon of Italian sing-along hits, dabbing his bald head with a blue handkerchief and making obscene jokes about short skirts. Behind him, a digital screen beamed the original movie poster, featuring ski bunnies tumbling together in a snowball. Then it suddenly changed to footage of an environmental award being given to F. Murray Abraham.
Mr. Calà struggled on and the room exploded when he finally played “Maracaibo” (“Rum and cocaine, Zaza”). He halted the film’s re-release with limited involvement and then marched offstage and through the screaming crowd with a dazed expression.
As he reached his friends and family in the next room and tapped his chest, waiters passed by with heaping plates of panettone. Mauro Happy, a 60-year-old publicist at the adjacent table, was happy to participate. “I’m in love,” he said in a hushed statement, “with cinema panettone.”