The Italian (2005) is a 6-year old Russian orphan who is being adopted by an Italian couple. When a desperate woman shows up at the orphanage looking for her son who has just left with adopted parents, our little man (Kolya Spiridonov) starts thinking he’d like to learn to read, sneak a peek at his personal file in the safe, and try to track down his birth mother. Hanging over the adventure is the worry that if he finds his birth mother, she may be an incredible disappointment and/or may turn him away.
The entire subtitled story is told at a leisurely pace, too slow for those who crave jump-cut action flicks, but I only once thought things were dragging. I stuck with the story because I liked the little guy. I did not particularly sympathize with this quest—a nice life in northern Italy sounds good to me. But I admired his pluck. When he set about learning to read from one of the teenage girls at the orphanage, he was tenacious. At first he withheld money from the big boys running the orphanage’s protection racket, and he took his beating. And this brings up another thing I liked about the movie—many of the people had a good side. So the truck driver’s whore (Olga Shuvalova) who said he had to pay for reading lessons apologized and said she’d teach him for free.
Gratefully, the movie keeps the social criticism low key, and, thus, more effective. We really get only three glimpses of the racket of selling children. Early on, one of the little guys in the orphanage says that the director or headmaster must be getting good money because after the last adoption he was in liquor for a week. Near the end of the movie, the obnoxious woman brokering the adoptions threatens to hold the director responsible for the lost revenue if the adoption falls through—about 5,000 Euros. The third criticism is provided by the character of the obnoxious woman herself, one of the few people in the movie without a shred of decency. While The Italian could have been melodramatic, while it could have been presented as a fairy tale, it is most effective as realism, not harsh realism but more a quiet observation of the way things are in modern Russia.
The cinematographer (Aleksandr Burov) keeps an appropriately muted palette so that when the boy runs “free,” his new red jacket stands out. The music is perfectly restrained, subtly supporting the mood of each scene, generally sparse and modern without grating. The spirit of the plucky kid rises above the environment.