Laughing in both official languages

Most directors, when they cast shows, look for talent with any number of attributes: great acting skills, good looks, a commanding camera presence, to name a few.

Those qualities were all-important to the creators of CBC Television's new half-hour series, the light romantic comedy Ciao Bella, but they also required something more -- actors who could speak fluent Québécois French as well as English. And, oh yes, if they knew some Italian, molto bene.

The upstart series from Steve Galluccio, author of the stage play and film Mambo Italiano, and his partners at Montreal's Cirrus Communications is something of an anomaly in TV land since it's a Canadian show that is blatantly playing the language card as a way to attract as many local eyeballs as it possibly can.

It's not the first time a show in this country has been simultaneously shot in both official languages ( The Last Chapter and He Shoots, He Scores also fall into this category), but it is the most extensive series (13 episodes are in the can) to take a stab at it.

Why bother? Well, Galluccio and one of his producers, André Béraud ( Les Aventures tumultueuses de Jack Carter and Naked Josh) felt it was important to hit the right note in the language in order to make the series seem authentic. So they painstakingly shot each scene in English, got everyone to stay in their places (including the camera angle), switched to French, and then back and forth. Again and again.

"For our show, we felt it was of the utmost importance to make the dialogue as authentic as possible," explains Béraud. "The ethnicity is a huge part of the comedy so it had to ring true," adds Béraud, a Montreal native whose own family hails originally from Haiti.

"The good thing was we were able to have in the lead role a homegrown actress, Claudia Ferri, a French Canadian, of Italian descent."

In Ciao Bella, Ferri plays Elena Battista, the eldest daughter in a wacky Italian-Canadian family in Montreal's Little Italy. She adores her parents, but they drive her mad. They live in the past. She is trying to carve out a future. There are, of course, non-stop clashes. After literally getting run over by a bus in the first episode, Ferri's character vows to become more independent. The series revolves around that uphill struggle.

In Toronto to promote the show recently, Ferri explains that she sees the program as a comedy in the tradition of the movie Moonstruck. And for goodness sake, don't mention to the affable actress that it seems a bit like that Canadian feature-film hit, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

"It's not anything like that," insists Ferri, a divorced mother of three who lives in Courtenay, B.C. "And Mambo Italiano certainly wasn't a copycat of [Nia Vardalos's film]either. We were already shooting Mambo before My Big Fat Greek Wedding even came out," says the thirtysomething actress, who played the exuberant Anna in the film version of Mambo Italiano.

" Ciao Bella is about way more than all of that. . . . It embraces English-speaking and French-speaking. It embraces all alternative cultures. And it plays on family democracy as well. And it doesn't try to box anybody into anything," concludes Ferri, who cut her teeth in TV in roles on shows such as Highlander and MacGyver, and moved on to films such as The Assignment, Hard Core Logo and Stardom.

So far, the show's off to a respectable start. On French-language Radio-Canada, where it airs on Thursdays at 9 p.m., it has an average audience of 400,000 -- not bad considering it's up against Quebec's top-rated dating reality show, Occupation Double, which draws about 2.7-million viewers. In English Canada, it debuted last Wednesday at 7 p.m., attracting roughly 286,000 viewers, as the lead-in to the wildly popular British sitcom, Coronation Street (which drew 610,000 that night). Again, however, Ciao Bella did relatively well given it was neck and neck with CTV's etalk Daily (which drew 423,000) and Global's Train 48 (which pegged an average audience of 48,000 in Ontario, and probably double that nationwide).

Béraud says it's too early to know if CBC will order another series. He has his fingers crossed that it will, since they've already written half of the next year -- and he promises many saucy twists and turns, including a healthy dose of romance for Elena.

"We hope people will fall in love with the family, and take them into their home. And having Ciao Bella in both languages means, hopefully, all Canadians will have a chance to appreciate our work."

Ferri adds the show attempts to bridge the divide between the old generation and the new. "Like I did with my own family," says the actress, who left in her late teens to train in New York.

"I'm sure every immigrant clan, no matter what country they come from, has had to confront the issues tackled in Ciao Bella.

"They all came into a foreign country, with foreign values and foreign habits, and had to build something.""

Surely, not just a Canadian, but a universal theme.

Ciao Bella airs Wednesdays at 7 p.m. on CBC-TV.