The positive points of freedom and happiness get another trumpeting in Bread And Tulips, a lighthearted (and just plain light) Italian comedy starring—and nearly redeemed by—Licia Maglietta. Playing an unappreciated housewife just reaching the far end of youthfulness, Maglietta is so convincing, and so winning, that she almost makes it possible to forget that she's stranded in such a predictable film. When a Rome-bound tour bus, whose passengers include her husband and two sons, accidentally strands her at a rest stop, Maglietta decides to hitch her way back north. But instead of disembarking at home, she pushes through to Venice, a city she's never seen, though she's lived near it her entire life. When Maglietta takes up with a colorful bunch of locals, including a self-described "holistic beautician and masseuse" (Marina Massironi) and a lonely restaurateur from Iceland (Bruno Ganz) who speaks in formal Italian, her short stay turns indefinite. Meanwhile, Maglietta's neanderthal husband (Antonio Catania) dispatches a bungling plumber-turned-private-eye (Giuseppe Battiston, surely the winner of some Italian Chris Farley lookalike contest) to retrieve his errant wife. All this might have worked as the pilot for a television show in the Northern Exposure/Ed vein, but as a film, it seems not so much stale as fossilized. Co-writer and director Silvio Soldini hardly plays fair: Catania is such a lout, and such an adulterous lout to boot, that only a fool would stay with him. Meanwhile, Maglietta's kids are quietly discarded as minor characters. Her performance blankets the film in charm, and Soldini makes his postcard Venice seem truly seductive, but the film's surfaces are so smooth, they're slippery.