Film Review
From Russia with luck
A Dickensian yarn on capitalism’s wild frontier.
The film titled The Italian never actually leaves Russia, although getting out of Russia is its theme. The setting is an orphanage that looks like an Industrial Revolution relic, worn and rusted, packed with kids.
Director Andrei Kravchuk effortlessly negotiates its many layers and rooms, presenting it as a teeming micro-culture. There are kids both wise and innocent. There are teenagers who have stayed on, now running secret economies out of the basement. There is a hapless, harried-looking director and the woman known only as Madam (Maria Kuznetsova) who wafts through the crowds of kids like a slightly more benign Cruella de Vil.
When Madam arrives, it’s big news – because she negotiates with families in prosperous countries who want to adopt. The best you can hope for is to be sent abroad with some passing Madonna or Angelina. Hence “the Italian”, the nickname for six-year-old Ivan “Vanya” Solntsev (a very impressive Kolya Spiridonov) who has been promised to a couple from – no surprise – Italy. When the Italians arrive at the beginning of the film, Russia is buried under grimy snow. Our first view of the angelic Vanya has him doing some mopping up, not loitering like the other brats. Of course he’s the right one.
This is an openly Dickensian yarn set within the lawless world that is the new, capitalist Russia (two lessons for this wild frontier: assume that all men are drunk; assume that everyone can be bribed). If it doesn’t sound subtle, you can be assured that it is affecting. Between his audition for the Italians and their collection of him, Vanya gets naturally curious about his birth mother. So he escapes, trying to make his way by train and bus and even foot in search of her – or at least the records that might tell him who she was (he needs to learn to read first).
By now, the snow’s thawed and the country looks green. But which landscape is the real Russia? The scenes in the orphanage have a harsher, more dingy look than the second half, shot in a softer, golden light – closer to the feel of fantasy. There’s that kind of timelessness.
Meanwhile, the terrible and endless history of Russia seems to be embodied in some of its old-timers – there’s an important moment when an elderly man talks with regret about how this once proud, now decrepit country is now exporting even its children.
In a funny way, though, this heart-rending film is doing exactly the same thing. Note that the viewer arrives with the Italians, who are looking at the frozen land from inside the warm car and talking off-camera about “the real Russia”, while the film’s cute, blond kid and uncomplicated romantic storyline suggest a product finely honed for the tastes of international arthouse audiences. And like the boy known by the same name, The Italian has charmed the West as intended, playing at more than 45 festivals and entered as Russia’s official candidate for best foreign language film at the 2006 Oscars.
