Italian for Beginners (2000)
Posted by thecatcanwait on June 7, 2008
A Dogme film. Eschews extraneous frills and fancy producing.
That means: no artificial lighting, no special effects, no musical soundtrack, no sticking cameras on cranes, no props, no superficial action etc.
A lot of No going on. A renunciation of glam and glitz and frothy genre contrivance (like The Spy Thriller, The Historical Drama, The Horror Flick etc)
The aim is to get your hand held camera focusing on real characters, telling a story authentic to the real life situation its set in.
All sounds like the kind of film I’d go for.
But this film is 2nd rate. When you put a primacy on realism you’ve got to get every nuance of the narrative to be spot on realistic. And this doesn’t.
I’ll give one example to illustrate:
If you go to an Italian evening class and your teacher dies in class of a heart attack – you don’t keep going back each week, sitting there in an empty room waiting, hoping, that a new teacher might turn up. You ring to check that the class is still running don’t you?. But the couples keep sitting there like bleeding lemons cus “Italian for Beginners” is the romantic conceit they’re all playing along with.
The film has too many of these implausibilities of plot and anomalies of character motivation. So it comes across as being as contrived and artificial as all the contrived and artificial films it is failing not to be.
And the characters didn’t seem sympathetically believable. All hopeless drips. A bit too in thrall with their own, and each others, misery.
And it was generic; a dull variation of a Rom-Com, a Glom-Rom.
(Glom= Gloomy)
Where’s Hugh Grant when you need him?
Dir: Lone Scherfig, Denmark
4/10
