The Italian
Directed by Andrei Kravchuk
The strange title of the new Russian import The Italian describes the alienation felt by the film’s 6-year-old protagonist Ivan (Kolya Spiridonov). He’s one of many boys from nursery school age to late adolescence who live in an orphanage that is a microcosm of the new Russia’s fearful social system. Ivan has been chosen for adoption by a visiting couple that has immigrated to Italy. Before his transfer is completed, Ivan is bartered over by the orphanage’s money-hungry administrators and its gang of teenage black marketeers. Ivan slowly awakens to the possibility that he might have been abandoned by mistake and may yet claim his natural mother’s love.
How did a plot this humanistic ever get imported to the U.S.? The last movie about an alienated child looking for love was Spielberg’s magnificent yet critically scorned A.I. For that reason, The Italian gambles that its fundamental emotions will please coarsened audiences. It plays very simply, like an anecdote that sketches larger issues. Director Andrei Kravchuk shows his debt to Italian neorealism in the naturalistic yet highly expressive performances of Spiridonov and the other children (the film was partly shot at a children’s home in Leningrad). The children’s desperation and innocence also reflects social collapse like De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief and Shoeshine. Kravchuk relays a moral emergency; he shows Russia’s habits through Ivan’s eyes and the critique is deliberately reminiscent of Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
Working with the great cameraman Alexander Boruv (who shot Sokurov’s Father and Son), Kravchuk achieves a look that combines realism with a sense of fable. Ivan’s search for his mother is always credible, yet also evocative of some spiritual significance. Do they teach this richness in Russia’s film schools? The Italian shames the schematic homilies of American movies like The Pursuit of Happyness and Antwon Fisher where personal journeys are reduced to success-story clichés.
The Italian is the latest beautiful Russian film to examine the relationship between children and adults as an account of the nation’s responsibility to its citizens. Father and Son and The Return were exquisite examples of this new genre that turns the patriotic into the personal. The last shot of Ivan’s face finally beholding what he was looking for is ingenious: A child’s anticipation and desire recalls the close-ups in A.I. and E.T., yet are cast toward us. American viewers will be moved. Russian viewers must feel challenged.
