This docu-fictional hybrid follows a blank-faced and talentless waiter in the ways of swanky silver service
This film is avowedly a docu-fictional hybrid, for which director Davide Maldi has shot fly-on-the-wall nonfiction scenes at a prestigious Italian “silver service” catering college where teenage boys are schooled in the ways of becoming smoothly efficient waiters in white jackets and bow ties. The fictional aspect evidently comes later, with the careful selection and curation of scenes, although this is arguably no more “fictional” a procedure than in any other documentary.
It follows Luca Tufano, whose blank, unreadable expression becomes more enigmatic as the film progresses. He is quite obviously terrible at this vocation, at one stage dropping an entire tray of glasses with a deafening crash. But at no point does Tufano talk back, or jeer at his teachers; neither does he look contrite, worried or determined to mend his ways. With a group of other boys, he is told how to lay tables and present food, how to stay alert and be discreetly polite and cheerful, and never to discuss his own views on politics and religion (although the boys are apparently required to attend some sort of creationist religious class as part of the course). They attend hotels and cruise ships where careworn waiters tell them to be on the lookout for different national characteristics at the breakfast buffet (the Spanish are late risers, apparently).