A conventional but graceful craftsman, veteran director Ettore Scola could be termed either an "art" filmmaker or a skilled popular entertainer. Perhaps evidence for the second description, his new film Unfair Competition is a comedy of stock types rather than individuals: almost all members of the distinguished cast are reduced to bumbling puppets, each with a limited schtick. Much of the action unfolds around a single overdressed period set: two rival clothes shops and their attached living-quarters, fronting a cobbled street with pines and vintage trams. While the stage-set or Punch-and-Judy effect is never more than an overtone, the mobile camera strikingly insists on the 3D solidity of this massive space: the two families are literally placed side-by-side throughout the film, a blindingly simple piece of visual rhetoric that encourages us to note both differences and similarities in their behaviourial styles. Perhaps the funniest scenes work through the contrast - on every literal and figurative level - between the rival patriarchs: Umberto the upright and pompous solid citizen, versus Leone the loose-limbed, silver-tongued Jew. The danger is that caricature in this context remains a two-edged sword, liable to reinforce the same stereotypical divisions it mocks; ultimately the Jewish characters emerge as more attractive but less directly knowable than their Christian counterparts.