The Case for Italian Life

It has taken me a wee while to determine how to judge this movie. The Italian is a movie from the Russian Federation, about a young orphan boy who is about to be adopted into an Italian family who decides instead to pursue his own genealogical quest around St Petersburg rather than just accept his Italian fate.

The most extraordinary thing about this movie is that most of the child actors are actually all orphans themselves, who grew up in the state institutions and who, while evidently not trained actors, are obviously completely believable. The depiction of Russian life in the orphanage is by no means a rosy recounting of an idyllic childhood, with the dilapidated facilities and fairly mercenary authority figures, but at the same time, neither is it shown as a totally bleak place without any moments of happiness.

Once the movie shifts from the orphanage to the Italians search for his mother on the streets of city, for me, the movie started to lose interest. While it shows some Russians adults as charming, if rough around the edges, the film starts to rely on the cuteness factor of the child, and the resolution is disappointing in its side stepping of several quite important issues. The fairly obnoxious and jangly musical score doesn't help matters much either.

It was a good film, of that I cannot deny, though I was not in as much rapture as the group of three in front of me who discussed events at length and yelped at the appropriate “scary” bits [as an aside, can one really be justifiably upset with talkers in a subtitled film if one does not understand the language?]. And the scenery and architectural style (if not the buildings themselves) were just as I remember it from my trip of just over a year ago (though mercifully, I did not experience a Russian winter).

But this slice of the reality of Russian life is mixed in with a bit of the fantastical as well, a bit of Equal amongst the cane sugar, adding up to something a bit too sweet for my own, more cynical tastes.

Verdict: Nice vodka, but needed a bit more of a kick