|
|
ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS
|
A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS’ DREAM as shot by Frederick Wiseman (or late Woody Allen on a bad day), ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS follows six lonely characters in search of each other. Starting with Andreas, a feckless tongue-tied empathic new pastor who has his hair cut by Karen, a hair stylist with an alcoholic abusive mother, we discover that each of them is tethered to this plain Danish town by a missing or unacknowledged Other -- a retiring pastor, an unrequited love, an abusive alcoholic mother, a belligerent unemployable best friend. And each is lonely, painfully lonely, their anguish revealed in delicate close-ups … shot with grainy film, in low light, in a jittering hand-held camera.
For, you see, ITALIAN FOR BEGINNES is both a lightweight romantic comedy and a Dogma film, the Lars Von Trier (BREAKING THE WAVES) spawned movement to be the anti-Hollywood: no special effects, no staged lighting, no voiceovers or music overs. Aside from its appeal to cinephiles, Dogma both defines and limits the stories. They are small, they are personal, but they’re also hard to see and hard to hear (fortunately, muttered dialog is less of a problem in a subtitled movie).
But with unknown actors can come a refreshing lack of expectation that creates storytelling space: we do not know who our protagonists will be, or what stories will be told. Instead we pay close attention to the complex pavane they trace as each in turn visits the others, crisscrossing as single people do in a small town, eventually congregating in that watering hole of the lonely single, the adult education class -- in this case, in Italian. Learning Italian, groping for the right words, becomes an obvious but effective symbol for allowing these chilly scarf-bundled Danes to gain touch with their feelings -- and as they thaw, so are we drawn in, warmed by their sincerity.
As with so many independent movies, you will suffer through a few Indiglo moments, a few “what’s happening?” whispers to your moveigoing companion. But Director Lone Scherfig has a great eye for the telling moment, the revealing face; she coaxes great vulnerability from her actors; she makes them all individuals about whom, ultimately, we do care. So when they achieve happiness, as all lonely singles in romantic comedies must, we are cheered with them.