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Trailer for "The Italian"

Two things about Andrei Kravchuk’s The Italian: It’s not likely to reach its nearest-to-ideal audience, and a vital part of its subject matter is never explicitly addressed. Let’s hold the first matter for a moment and turn to the second.

The film’s only implicit but integral second theme is the economic and social collapse of the Russian Federation after the disintegration of the former Soviet Union in late 1991. Its title character, Vanya, a six-year-old boy of very uncommon resourcefulness and determination, undertakes an arduous search for his unknown mother across the impoverished, neglected countryside, far from the expanding, consumer-goods-laden centers in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, to which tourists and journalists are drawn. Vanya is stuck in the new free market’s broad, diverse, geographic underbelly.

He isn’t an Italian, of course. That’s a sobriquet pinned on him by the older residents of the run-down provincial orphanage where he lives, after he’s selected for adoption by a couple from Italy, a land which seems like an unimaginable Eden to the other kids.

But Vanya isn’t fixed on his envied good fortune. His thoughts are focused on the mother he can’t remember, particularly after he has a brief, disturbing conversation with a woman who’s turned away from the orphanage when she tries to visit the son she gave up years ago.

That encounter moves Vanya to set off in search of his own mother. The Italian follows his odyssey as he interacts with a cross-section of ordinary Russians who hinder or assist him—and sometimes both in succession.

The movie has a combined flavor reminiscent of both Italian neo-realism and Charles Dickens. The latter element is stronger, and gives the movie much of its texture and narrative thrust, though you will be relieved to hear that the people whom Vanya encounters are rather nicer than the ones who haunted Dickens’ stories. With the exception of juvenile thugs in a railroad yard, there are no real villains. Even several of the people who try to stop his efforts are capable of sympathetic responses.

Kravchuk has elicited from his child and adolescent actors a number of fine performances. Kolya Spiridonov’s Vanya is an exceptional achievement. The young actor manages to embody Vanya’s vulnerability and still convince us of his cleverness and courage.

Unfortunately, The Italian is unlikely to attract what is perhaps its most appropriate audience: reasonably literate kids three to five years older than Vanya. If you know one who isn’t disdainfully adverse to subtitles—a disdain shared by a lot of adults—and you don’t mind exposing her/him to a couple of naughty words and some sad events, take her/him to The Italian.