The Italian (2007)

Captivating movie !

Best movie of this year hands down!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Andrey Kravchuk uses a six-year-old orphan's quest to find his mother to project a corrupted, predatory and deracinated Russia. Little Vanya resists adoption by an Italian couple because he wants his mother to be able to find him. Against all odds he finds her. In an improbable happy ending, she takes him in and his friend Anton from the orphanage is sent to the Italian couple in his stead. Unlike his other friend's desperate prostitute mother, who ends up a drunken suicide, Vanya's mother has a home and a job as nurse, so she can now take care of him.The film's key theme is the predatory nature of everyone around Vanya. As an orphanage staff member reads from Kipling's Jungle Book, Vanya is the Mowgli figure raised amid wolves with an occasional kindness to remind him of what humanity should be.In the orphanage the older boys have institutionalized their predation, with vicious beatings and the exploitation of the vulnerable. The girls are sent out as prostitutes and the young boys have to turn in their meagre carwash earnings. It's a parody of the socialist community, as the girl who helps Vanya escape says the pooled money belongs to all of them so she could take it. It's the empty form of socialism without the generous spirit. Though she virtuously teaches Vanya to read and tries to rescue him, her instincts are also predatory as she seeks to exploit anyone else she can.The toughs who rob and beat Vanya at the train tracks are an outlaw version of the orphanage's young exploiters. They won't give him any break but in the bones. The teenage gang that saves Vanya from the orphanage's manager are a third group of semi- organized violence, hanging out bored, eager for a fight. The three groups of young people form an aimless, spiritless and needy generation with no values or purpose. They provide a bleak vision of Russia's future. The orphanage administration comprises three adults. Madam is a corrupt capitalist, obsessed with profiteering from the adoptions, happy to spread bribe money around to get her way. One colleague is a beaten man, rueful of his failed chance to have been a pilot. The other is a more aggressive brute, with a sexual interest in Madam, but Vanya wins him over by slashing open his own arm in desperation. His beating by the gang may have eased his brutality towards Vanya. The title — Vanya's new nickname at the orphanage — is ironic because the boy doesn't want to leave cold wet Russia for the warmth of Italy. He wants his mother, who ultimately provides a warmth deeper than the climate.The closing closeup on Vanya evokes the famous last shot in Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Where Jean Pierre Leaud stares out on an empty sea, uncertain, here Vanya beams at his beautiful blonde mother and spells out the happy ending in a voice-over letter to friend Anton. Against the bleak social landscape the film finds a surprising hope in the young star's performance. His face and body provide emotional animation and he proves of increasing resourcefulness in making his way back through enemies and abusers to his maternal roots. In finding his mother he finds the old Mother Russia, an ideal lost amid the current corruption.

In the great continental tradition, the story is told in a rather subdued and understated fashion, without so much preachy debate and shouting match as the Anglo-Americans like to do. A lesser movie maker could have easily made this into a cheap tear-jerker. Comparing to movies such as 'Cider House Rules', this one is far more 'realistic' and down to earth. You can't help finding yourself following the boy's steps or even in his jacket with his every move. That is the power of great movies like this. The French movie 'Rosetta' comes to mind. But if that is a shiny gem, this is a field of diamond! It has a sustained power that stays with you and absorbs deeper as the minutes goes by. One other great point about this movie is that people are not black and white, humanities are abound despite the harshness and cruelty all around, perhaps with the only exception of the orphan trader herself. Then again, maybe that is what it takes to make a living like that anyway.I gave 9 instead of 10 because I am not convinced that Vanya could have mastered all the necessary reading skill in that short period of time at his age (5-6). Understanding the stuff from a formal document is not the same as guessing some short phrases from a 'Winnie the Pooh's book. Of course he could be a true genius. But this 'exception' feels forced comparing to all other characters and plot elements since there's nothing else that requires ostensible exception in life - all could have really happened. Even the weather was made to appear 'natural' rather than following the characters mood in the plot like less movies would have done. I can't help feeling that those who asked why the driver let the boy go were brain washed by the 'black/white good vs evil' Hollywood fairy tales (nonsenses) for too long. In real world, most people do have hearts. And it shouldn't take a Russian speaker to figure this one out.This is not a dark movie despite its plot line seems to suggest at the first glance. The true power of it lies in the beautiful warmth of humanity in many of the unlikely places, unseemly characters, and unfortunate moments. Life can be hard for some, but worthwhile if they try hard enough.No dramatic beginning or ending here. Everything just happened. But of course, all the details are there to make it all feels so natural and smooth. That's what the masters do.

The Italian/Italianetz is a good use of neorealistic effects almost worthy of Zavattini and De Sica to tell the story of a Russian orphan at the present time, a boy of six who's set up for adoption by an Italian couple and then determines to sneak off and see if he can find his own mother instead. Arranging adoptions on a freelance basis, apparently, outside the chaotic social system of present-day Russia, is a lady they call Madam (Mariya Koznetsova), plump, bossy, slick, followed around by a glum factotum, Grisha (Nikolai Reutov), who's her chauffeur, toady, and sometime lover. She makes a bundle out of each successful adoption by foreigners and makes free with bribes and threats to be sure her deals go through. A product of modern Russian capitalism, the money-mad Madam is more villain than fairy godmother.Using a photo followed up by an on-site interview at the detsky dom (children's home), Madam has arranged with an Italian couple, Roberto and Claudia, to adopt young Vanya Sonetsiv (Kolya Spridonov). But then when Vanya meets up with a remorseful drunken mom who apparently commits suicide after learning her child has been adopted and taken to Ialy, he gets the urge to investigate his own record. Everybody acts like he's such a lucky guy. But supposing he goes off with Roberto and Claudia? Mightn't he miss out on a chance to be reunited with his own mother, should she have a change of heart and want him back? Is there such a chance, though? And where is his mother? To find out, first Vanya has to learn to read – a detail the orphanage has neglected – and find a way to get a look at his file.The detsky dom's administration is not exactly on the up-and-up. The wild looking director (Yuri Itskov) is drinking up all the funds, and to fill in the vacuum this leaves a small clique of older boys to pretty much run the place and its finances, like a rawly capitalistic petty mafia, sporting scars, tattoos and muscles and throwing around words like "cosa nostra." Led by a boy named Kolyan (Denis Moiseenko), they have their own little systems of businesses and payoffs. And this shadow regime, up to a point anyway, really seems to work. The kids' beds are clean, and the girls mend their clothes and read them fairy tales at bedtime. But it's clear there's no pathway to a better future in the life here. Vanya, whom everybody now calls "the Italian" because of the good fortune they feel he's destined for when the papers go through in a month or so, now wangles his way in with the older boys, and they help him out. Among these undergrown mafiosi is a girl named Irka (Olga Shuvalova) who they pimp out to truck drivers. It's she who teaches Vanya to read. The big boys help Vanya break into the room where the records are kept and he gets the address of the maternal home where he came from, and Irka takes Vanya to the railway station, having robbed the boys' current till and intending to run off with him. Madam immediately finds out that Vanya has disappeared and, standing to lose her payoff if she can't deliver him to the Italian couple, she sets off in hot pursuit with Grisha.What follows is a wild chase in which Vanya shows what he's made of. Nothing, and that includes some pretty rough scrapes, can stop him from his relentless flight and quest. The Italian never loses its authentic flavor either as it moves toward an emotionally satisfying if somewhat hasty finish Still, it's obviously in the first half of the film that we get our best look at this world and its people and the Russian orphan problem. It might even have been a better treatment of that issue if some of the earlier scenes had been allowed to play out a bit longer.The San Francisco Chronicle's venerable Ruthe Stein called this the best "naturalistic performance by a Russian child actor since Kolya a decade ago." Spiridonov is very effective and appealing in his role, and perhaps The Italian has some links with that somewhat saccharine earlier film. But The Italian is more chastening than Kolya. A more appropriate recent comparison (and another great youth performance in Russian) is the picaresque, unpredictable Schizo (2004), directed by Guldchat Omarova with the 15-year-old Oldzhas Nusupbayev. The Italian isn't saccharine, but it's also not as grim a view of the plight of lost Russian children as Lukas Moodysson's deeply depressing 2002 film Lilja 4-Ever. See all four and decide for yourself which feels like the most convincing and cinematic story of Russian childhood. You'll have to consider whether Kravchuk undercuts or strengthens his material by turning it into a fairy tale. It was the urge to depict a growing social problem and at the same time tell an engaging story that must have drown a documentarian like Kravchuk to this subject. He has worked well with his non-actors and his writer Andrei Romanov, and Aleksandr Burov has provided a misty, subtly colored cinematography.

this was one of the best movies i have seen in a long time. not only was kolya spiridov magnificent, every actor young and old were intense. the lyricism of this movie is simply magnificent. i felt the cold, the dampness, the starkness and disagreeing completely with someone else's comment on this movie, i found the score perfect. economical, to the point, letting us feel the story without suggesting it for us as Hollywood tends to do. also... directed superbly where the main character doesn't get cheap emotions out of us by making us 'cry' by crying. we suffer his plight a great deal more as he goes through the film just as is. superb, intricate, inspired. this film deserves great recognition and all the accolades a great movie should ever get. i recommend it greatly.