Department Store

Department Store (Grandi magazzini, 1986) is an Italian comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Directors Franco Castellano and Giuseppe Moccia packed the cast with some of the biggest names in Italian cinema of the era — Paolo Villaggio, Nino Manfredi, Lino Banfi, Enrico Montesano, Renato Pozzetto, Christian De Sica and Ornella Muti, among others.

The whole film stays inside a single sprawling department store, and that's all the structure it needs. Sketch follows sketch: customers get lost, staff argue over jurisdiction, and a woman who lost her glasses in the opening minutes wanders confidently through the chaos convinced she has things perfectly in hand. The episodes don't connect into a plot — the store is the plot.

Italian comedy of this period was less about story and more about performance, and the ensemble delivers exactly that. Villaggio alone is worth the runtime. Stream Department Store (1986) online on iFILM.