An Orphan's Odyssey
'The Italian' is a trivial but not unpleasant tale of a child's search for his mom
By Andy Klein
The Italian, the press materials and ads inform us, was selected as Russia's official entry for Best Foreign Language Film for the 2006 Academy Awards. It's only when you remember that the Oscar year means the year of the ceremony, not the year of the release, that it becomes clear that the movie isn't in contention now, but was one of the entries not to be nominated a year ago.
That failure is not a big surprise: While The Italian is a nice little movie, it is also as wispy and insubstantial as cotton candy, but not quite as sweet. It's not merely that it doesn't wrestle with big issues, which is just dandy by me most of the time, but that its pleasures - earned sentiment, psychological observation, a child's wonderment-tinged perspective - are ultimately a bit tepid. It fills the time pleasantly, but it's hard to imagine anything sticking in the mind the next day.
Kolya Spiridonov plays Vanya, a six-year-old living in a Russian orphanage somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It's not a particularly high-rent accommodation, but nor is it a Dickensian slave camp. The kids are happy, in a desultory sort of way. And there is always the hope that a well-off foreign couple will arrive and choose one of them for adoption.
That hope is alive even more among the staff than it is among the orphans. The headmaster (Yuri Itskov) gets a nice piece of change with every adoption arranged through a broker referred to as Madam (Maria Kuznetsova). It's not that the pair aren't also happy for the youngsters to get a chance at a better life; but their benevolent urges are only incidental to their greed.
So imagine everyone's shock when Vanya balks at being handed over to a kindly Italian couple, with whom he has gotten on famously. His hesitancy stems from that classic orphan urge - to meet the mother who gave him up and perhaps to find out why. This desire is only magnified when another boy's mom, returning to locate him but repeatedly rebuffed, commits suicide out of frustration.
Vanya schemes to break into the locked files and locate his original adoption papers. Unfortunately, he can't read, and none of the older kids will help. But his determination is so strong that he learns how to read in record time, with the help of a friendly older worker (Olga Shuvalova). Eventually he slips away and heads off to the city of his origins, repeatedly evading the furious Madam and her minions as they try to catch him.
This is the first fictional feature directed by Andrei Kravchuk, whose filmography includes numerous documentaries and screenplays. It's allegedly based on a true story and might have benefited from some further embellishment. That is, the time spent in the orphanage, which takes up more than half the film, feels like little more than an extended prologue to the important stuff - Vanya's adventures on the road.
The listlessness of the early material is exacerbated by a particularly ugly visual style. Unless it's the result of some budgetary or technical lab problem, one has to assume that Kravchuck and cinematographer Alexander Burov have inexplicably chosen to film everything with almost no contrast. The dark scenes are too dark; and the bright scenes look washed out and bleached. The look is less offputting during the second half, which takes place mostly outdoors.
For all that, The Italian is never bad (though the abruptness of the ending qualifies as baffling and unsatisfying). But it's hard to believe that this was the best the Russians could come up with from a year's worth of productions.
Published: 01/18/2007
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