UNDER THE CHINESE RESTAURANT
Ivan is a small average guy, handsome, but without any big personality, who lives under the double yoke of his eccentric mother, great fan of aerobics, and his boss and future wife, with a sharply dominant character. Some days before the wedding, he witnesses a hold-up; the criminals who realise he is there hunt him down and, while fleeing, Ivan gets lost in the underground of a Chinese restaurant. He opens a door… and ends up his feet in the sand, next to the sea, under the burning sunrays of two suns!
It is a surrealist world that he discovers, inhabited by strange creatures, and above all, by Eva, a beautiful girl, and her father, an extremely strange man, an inventor of some strange objects…
But you would need far less to radically change Ivan’s whole life (or anyone else’s for that matter): Eva falls in love with her hero and decides to accompany him in “his” world, where he wishes to make some juicy trade using some of the father’s inventions…
It is the specialist of animation movies, Bruno BOZZETTO, famous in Italy for his movie Allegro Non Troppo (among others), who directed Under the Chinese Restaurant, his first movie where animation is pushed into the background. This story, a bittersweet surrealistic tale with a nonconformist morality, was a great success in terms of critics in Italy and the US:
“A sci-fi comedy with a well-filmed romance.” – Variety
“BOZZETTO has an over-the-top humour which blows… SANDRELLI (Eva) and BOTOSSO (Ivan) are disarming of innocence.” – Vancouver Sun
“A movie of quest with a romantic dimension, some humour and a bit of social critics… It is an open door to fantasy, an ecological fable with morality. Under the Chinese Restaurant has more charm in ten minutes than any other Hollywood movie.” – Il Giorno
Starring the delicious Bernard BLIER as the “crazy” inventor.