James has been a dear friend of mine for years and years. I recall one particularly wonderful afternoon spent getting very drunk on a stone bench in Boston’s Little Italy whilst sharing our delight over Jean Cocteau’s “The Art of Cinema.” We are creative soul mates and must live at least 500 miles apart or else die in the heat of each other’s suns. This is the only reason why James lives in Beunos Aires, Argentina. Together we would cause far too much trouble.

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For the past few years I have been living in Buenos Aires, enjoying a little bit of paradise. This far south, it is easy to remain blissfully unaware of the world outside my adopted city, with news and familial nagging lost somewhere over the equator. I’ve walked the long road of assimilation, navigating the pitfalls of sloppy conjugation and verbal embarrassment. I’ve offended locals and invited muggings with outrageous foreign fashions and for a long time led the life of an outsider. But over time, I have learned the rules while gradually gaining the respect of my Argentine friends. Slowly being accepted as not just another clueless, carpetbagging foreigner means being granted the gift of reluctant relaxation. Gone are the ghastly stares of yesterday, which means I can now go an entire meal without addressing the waitress as pig-fucker and enjoy far cheaper cab fare. But, with the return of of the World Cup, there has been a familiar feeling afoot here in Arcadia.

As a stranger to football culture, it seemed the entire country has been throwing an epic party for a few weeks now, one to which–forgive the cliche–I was not invited. On game days, streets are abandoned. Shops and schools are closed. A makeshift sign on a hospital reads, “emergencies only.” Impromptu parades and fireworks randomly materialize upon the city, in what I assume are signs of victory. These bizarre celebrations leave people jubilant, overwhelmed with a pride that comes from simply being Argentine.

But on a Saturday in early July, Argentina suffered a brutal loss to some Aryan nation and the celebration was abruptly cut short, leaving nowhere for the nationalistic frenzy it created to flow. Left in in its place was a setting ripe for what I like to call Paranoia Abroad. A sudden feeling of an entire foreign nation collectively focusing an evil eye in my direction, a brief moment of unwelcome and a swift return to outsider status. It could be set off by a butchered word or a detected feigned cheer. But there is no mistaking it and the dread that it brings, that for even an instant you may once again become: That stupid American.

In a cruel return to my first months here, once again my world is hostile, once again I am the Paranoid Abroad. I tiptoe with the greatest care and watch my accent, careful not to make a sound that in these dark hours could be mistaken for German. Counter clerks and cab drivers seem to glare accusingly during my desperate trips to the outside world for the essentials of chocolate and rented videotape. With even my slender-wristed friends temporarily forgetting an allegiance to aesthetics, I seek refuge in the only certainty I know: film. I flatter myself with feelings of solidarity with its characters, take personal responsibility for their triumphs, and use specific scenes to convince myself of my own fledgling sanity. Because yes, they are out to get me.

In these desperate times, it is film that remains the only safe place for people like us.

I present:

Franco Brusati’s rarely-seen Pane e Cioccolata (Bread & Chocolate, 1973).

First, observe this title sequence, as it defines the sensation that is Paranoia Abroad. The feeling comes as quick as it leaves, but in these brief moments, whole cities, whole countries, have turned against you! Even the birds.

(And I trust you to watch the whole thing.)

Pane e Cioccolata stars Nino Manfredi, one of Italy’s most brilliant actors, in a story of a “southern Italian worker pathetically out of place in Switzerland, forced by economic stringency to remain there.”

Manfredi plays Nino Garofoli our Latin spiritual guide through a cruel and Anglo-Saxonized world, in a performance strongly evoking Totò, that hero of the low Italian comedy. Scene after scene of Manfriedi’s constant cultural faux pas and social blunders will be all too familiar to those who have ever lived abroad and can recall, with horror, the initial mistakes one makes on their first weeks in a new country.

Nino’s misadventures through a Swiss Alps town are as hilarious as they are heartbreaking. We watch him in all his Italian glory, all cigarettes and tacky clothing, littering his way across the picturesque Swiss landscape. Where every tree and every child is planted and planned centuries in advance, his mere presence seems to be an affront on the Germanic order that holds the country together.

For anyone who has ever been the butt of a WASP’s joke, watching this buffoonish dark Italian break all the rules of the lily-white, polite Swiss society can be quite cathartic. But beneath the film’s slapstick and Chaplinesque exterior lies a more urgent message than mere cultural vindication. As the film progresses, we realize Manfredi’s story is one in a million. He belongs to a world of hungry immigrants who come from all over Europe with high hopes of Swiss prosperity, but find only slightly better circumstances then from whence they came. The director presents us with multiple scenes contrasting the idyllic lives of the Swiss against the near-slavery of the immigrant workers, painfully magnifying the immense economic differences between them. As we watch Nino as envious as he is horrified of his new surroundings, we begin to understand the severity of his situation, and most of the films previous humor wears off.

Insecure Italian-Americans like myself will be delighted with a subplot of the slow unraveling of Aryan appearances. When the dark underbelly of the civilized Swiss surfaces, it reveals a sinister world, finally confirming all your life-long paranoid delusions against the blond-haired and blue-eyed. If you are like me, you will find yourself shouting triumphantly at your screen and your pets, something along the lines of, “I ALWAYS TOLD YOU THESE BASTARDS WERE EVIL!”

An aside: people familiar with Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy could see Pane e Cioccolata as its counter-opposite. Ingrid Bergman’s frigid Katherine Joyce, lost in a world of Italian lust and fertility, even ends up falling victim to the same moments of brief paranoid indulgence.

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James Santella is an amateur occultist and certified beekeeper.  His devotion to Pasolini and rejection of Academia have currently exiled him to Argentina where his culinary work has forced critics to compare him to Dr. Faustus. If in Buenos Aires be sure to visit his Puerta Cerrada. http://scenna-santella.tumblr.com/