|
THE ITALIAN Send This Review to a Friend
It is only the first month of 2007, but “The Italian” already stakes a claim to be remembered as among the year’s outstanding films. For a Russian import, the title of the film seems odd, but it is the nickname for a young boy in a Russian orphanage due to be adopted by a couple from Italy and thereby find a way to a supposedly better life than the bleak one he experiences in this remote outpost of abandonment. But there’s a hitch. The lad doesn’t want to go.
Andrei Kravchuk has directed a beautiful drama that has a strong emotional pull yet is grounded in the kind of realism that elevates the film to an admirable artistic level reminiscent of Italian classics like “The Bicycle Thief.” At the center is six-year-old Vanya, convincingly played by Kolya Spiridonov without airs in a manner that will grab your heart and stir rooting for him as a result of his tenaciousness and emotional hunger.
Vanya longs to locate his birth mother and assumes that if he goes to Italy, he’ll never find her, and she’ll never find him, a yearning nurtured by a deeply upsetting event involving another mother who tries to retrieve her already adopted child.
“The Italian,” scripted by Andrei Romanov, would be of interest just as a personal story. But the film becomes much more than that. It is a searing portrait of an orphanage and an adoption processes tainted by greed and payoffs, mainly personified by a wheeler-dealer called Madam, portrayed with colorful but chilling effectiveness by Maria Kuznetsova, who is determined to protect her profits.
The seedy home itself is largely run by the older orphans, some of whom have learned how to be operators themselves, forcing the younger ones to turn over money they earn on the side. One teenager, Irka (Olga Shuvalova) is a hooker who works the truck routes. Adoption is a way out, and indeed, one young friend of Vanya would be eager to go in his place. Irka undertakes to teach Vanya to read, important to him in his plan to seek his mother.
That’s as much of the setup as you need know. The film takes a melodramatic turn and pulls us along in its drama, always with a sense of place and circumstance that is captured, much in the way of a documentary. The ending requires some quick reading of subtitles that should linger longer. But you will remember this film and Vanya in particular long after leaving the cinema. A Sony Pictures Classics Release.
|