Patricia Zupan Lecture "Italian Food, Family & Table on Film: Ivano De Matteo's The Dinner (I nostri ragazzi, 2014)"

International and Global Studies Colloquium lecture “Italian Food, Family, and Table on Film: Ivano De Matteo’s The Dinner (I nostri ragazzi, Our Kids, 2014)” by Patricia Zupan, C.A. Dana Professor of Italian, Middlebury College. Lunch is free for current Middlebury College students/faculty/staff; $5 for others; RSVP by 10/29 to rcga@middlebury.edu.

Abstract: Ivano De Matteo’s radical transformation of the Dutch novelist Hermann Koch’s international best-seller Het diner (The Dinner, 2009) emerges the most critically acclaimed of other present Dutch and American film versions. Its divergence from the novel’s narrative line renders more credible the common dramatic pretext: a luxurious restaurant meal, where two affluent, educated brothers and their wives confront an inconceivable ethical dilemma, a blurred crime watch video of the privileged teenage cousins’ brutal and senseless murder of a homeless immigrant woman. This version gains its special power by focusing on the loss of familial conviviality, closely building to that final, fatal meal by representing not one but thirteen cooking and dining scenes of the two families that progressively characterize familial dysfunction. This focus on family, food, and table marks the film’s italianità, but far beyond this, increases the contemporary audience’s capacity for tragic recognition.

Sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs