The Italian

Review by Keri Sutherland | 15 Aug 2007

Orphans, snow and dodgy looking potato soup are usually a failsafe method of aptly tugging at the old heart strings. Certainly, director Aleksandr Burov does not shy away from allowing this film to resonate unflinchingly of another, more familiar hard-knock life. At the film’s emotional epicentre is obstreperous six-year-old Vanya who is pulled between the vying opportunities of adoption and the unmissable chance to locate his birth mother.

Wicked Dickensian characters provide the film with a blackly comic undertone, notably with the madam of the crumbling orphanage, clad in cartoonish PVC, practically salivating at the prospect of exchanging young Vanya for a hefty sum. The rather more gentle-minded headmaster similarly comes to accept his dependency on ‘selling kids for bucks’ in order to provide for his lust for vodka. But it is exactly that dependency that marks out the striking depiction of the state of government-run orphanages in Russia.

Intriguing and mature performances by the child stars of this film drown out the more paltry efforts of the adult actors, whose caricatures of the controlling adult world often fall short of truly emotive rendering. Vanya’s doe-eyed determination to succeed in his quest at times belittles the squalid reality of his situation, but on the whole this fiercely precocious child manifests his talent in an accomplished and compelling on-screen debut.