(2005, 99 min) Six-year-old Vanya is just another commodity in the profitable Russian orphan trade. His orphanage exemplifies the open market of the former Soviet Union, replete with infinite, intermingled layers of corruption and bureaucracy, and graft an accepted and acknowledged factor of any business transaction. The orphanage is a repository for the rejected, the marginalized and the lost; it is its own maladapted family, from the youngest child to the oldest caretaker. Indeed, some of the caretakers have been in this system their whole lives.
Vanya has been chosen for a wealthy couple from Italy, garnering him the nickname "The Italian." He worries that his mother won't be able to find him if she comes for him after he moves, a possibility that others tell him is highly improbable. But when another mother comes for her child after he has been adopted, Vanya's trepidation grows. He learns to read so he can examine his files, looking for any information that will help him find his mother. With opportune help from sympathetic sources, he begins his odyssey to find his mother, a woman who is only a name and an ephemeral emotion to him.
The Italian is an effective and unexpected blend of quasi-documentary grit and fairy tale hyperrealism. Kolya Spiridonov is remarkable as young Vanya, whose journey encapsulates the eternal struggle for the survival of both body and soul. His trek takes on the aura of pilgrimage as he encounters the best and the worst of humankind: ogres and penitents, sinners and saints. The Italian is an involving revelation, another filmic glimpse into the tormented Russian psyche.
© TLA Entertainment Group
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