Redemption is never an easy thing to achieve.
Sure, religions chuck it around like luminously promising confetti and self-help coaches guarantee it’s but a mantra and a positive attitude away, and while they are all very compelling and attractive options that attract a great deal of attention and devotion, the reality is that reaching a place of true, lasting redemption is never easy.
It in fact involves a great deal of sacrifice and hard work, something that the two key characters in the Davide Minnella-directed (to a screenplay by Gianluca Bernardini, Giordana Mari and Stefano Sardo) film, The Perfect Dinner (La cena perfetta), come to appreciate all too well when a thoroughly unique set of circumstances conspires to bring them together.
Carmine (Salvatore Esposito) is a man who has been sent to Rome by his mafia boss foster father of sorts, Don Pasquale (Gianfranco Gallo), to run a restaurant whose sole purpose is to launder the considerable sums of dirty money that is sent to it.
Dislocated, physically and emotionally, by being forced to leave the only real home he’s ever known, and desperate to mean something to a man who stepped in to help raise him after his father died, Carmine arrives in Rome unsure of who he is anymore or what he wants to do.
Bemused by the restaurant’s only employee, Rosario (Gianluca Colucci) who happily admits he’s not so much a chef as a defroster – the restaurant brings in frozen meals by the dozen and serves them to less-than-impressed customers, none of whom you can safely safe will be coming back (but then that’s not the point, really), Carmine goes along with the operation as its set down, hoping that by compliantly laundering Pasquale’s ill-gotten gains that he’ll find some kind of redemption for mistakes made back home.
But then he meet fiery, uncompromising Consuelo (Greta Scarano), the chef who used to run the restaurant he now occupies whose culinary star shone brightly but briefly before her restaurant failed and she was forced to go on staff at a rival establishment, resentful that her long-harboured dream came to nothing.
In the tradition of all good romantic comedies, and it should be noted here that The Perfect Dinner is substantial an offering than most entries in this feel good genre, their initial meeting is a feisty one, mostly on Consuelo’s part with Carmine, intrigued and attracted, unsure what to make her at first.
That is, until he tries her cooking, a epiphanic event that sees him ask her to come work for him, with the aim of turning his joke restaurant into the real deal; it is Carmine’s chance to prove he can achieve something away from Don Pasquale, and in fact do more than requested of him, and for Consuelo, it is her chance to reignite her dream and send it off on the trajectory she always intended for it to follow.
Promise is writ large and though Carmine and Consuelo butt her heads more than a few times consequently to agreeing to go into partnership, it looks like the redemption the two emotionally scarred people hope for – both had less than ideal childhoods, marred by significant familial pain and loss – is within grasp.
Naturally, of course, redemption, as observed is never that easy, and in The Perfect Dinner, where romantic whimsy comes hard up against the grim realities of mafia life as Carmine’s best friend, Giuliano (Marlon Joubert) is hunted for stealing money from Don Pasquale’s ensnaring kindhearted, loyal Carmine along the way, is seems harder than it is for most to achieve.
Expertly balancing scenes of rom-com sigh-inducing loveliness – Carmine and Consuelo are all but fated to come together and when they do, it is every bit as adorable as you are hoping for because goddamit they both deserve some mutually supportive, unconditional love – and dark threats of implied and realised violence, The Perfect Dinner is an unusual beast of a rom-com movie that ends up working rather nicely.
Granted the ending, which is as rom-comy as you’d expect, is a little to sugary sweet (though this reviewer happily lapped it up because awwww) for some of the grimly realistic events that proceed it, and there are some narrative contrivances to get to that happy-ever-after finish line, but overall, The Perfect Dinner does an exemplary job of keeping the tension admirably tight between the harshness of a world that rewards the dogs who triumphantly eat the dogs by whatever violent means necessary, and the promise of redemption that comes from two people finding love and the shared purpose that comes with it.
It’s hard to believe in fairytales when you come from the blighted backgrounds of Carmine and Consuelo, and while the initial part of the film actively works to convince them both it might just be done, the latter half sets about seeking to valid every last one of their cynical, emotionally bankrupt expectations.
That’s not the end point it’s aiming for, of course, because redemption and hope are the name of the narrative game here, but by always reminding us in ways big and small that Carmine and Consuelo’s dream dangles on the flimsiest of threads, The Perfect Dinner gives it rom-com centre some real emotional muscularity and real world tension, making the payoff feel far less contrived than it might otherwise be.
Granted the real world, especially one as ruthlessly and heartlessly defined as that of the mafia-influenced with which Carmine is inextricably linked, are likely far too brutal to let a love as wonderful as the one he and Consuelo enjoy to go the distance and free them both from the pain of the past and the threat of the present, but The Perfect Dinner grants us such a gift, offering the delicious hope, and this is a film that vaults food to the top of the narrative pile almost as much as it does love and hope, that redemption is possible and that with it, comes the chance to pursue love on your terms, whatever that ends up looking like.