Italian For Beginners

Directed by Lone Scherfig

Starring Anders W. Berthlesen, Anette Støvelbæk, Lars Kaalund, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen and Peter Gantzler

Rated R for language and some sexuality.

Background info:

If you don’t know about Dogme95 yet, I highly recommend visiting www.dogme.dk and looking around. Click “manifesto”. I’ve got something of my own written on the dogme movement so maybe Ben will post it someday or else we’ll put it up on the new site we’re working on. I’m sure you’re excited. By the way this is a Danish film that came out in Europe two years ago but is only now making the rounds on the art-house circuit in the States.

Review:

Romantic comedies seem to be developing a bit of self-awareness, lately. Just a little I guess, but the trend does seem to be emerging. James Mangold’s Kate and Leopald tweaked the standard formula and turned itself into a kind of post-modern genre splicer, combining time travel and Meg Ryaness. I never said it was a good idea. On the international front Hella Joof’s En Kort En Long (which has been inanely titled “Shake it All About” for the festival circuit), played up every romantic comedy convention but the big one (the lovers are both men) with almost Indiana Jones style camp. In general there seems to be a movement towards recognizing the formulaic nature of the genre and perhaps even playing with it in the manner that horror films have ever since Halloween.

I only mention this trend because Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners ignores it completely. After half an hour or so you could write the rest of the film yourself and be reasonably sure you didn’t leave anything important out. The story centers around six Copenhageners who get to know each other by taking Italian classes at night. Six, oddly enough, is divisible by two. You get the point.

None of this is to say however, that the details of the film aren’t interesting or that the characters aren’t unusual. They are and the film certainly doesn’t conform to the smile-cry-smile format of the Hollywood romantic comedy. The movie deals with issues such as death and being different with sensitivity and subtlety. Still, you’re never in doubt of the outcome. The performances all fall somewhere in the ok to pretty good range and the ensemble cast show a knack for comedic timing, a very good thing when dealing with this kind of story.

The most interesting aspect of the film’s direction was the initial decision to make it a dogme picture (see link above). The Danes have produced several wonderful and interesting films following the dogme manifesto, but each one of them up to this point had dealt with aspects of the dark underbelly of the human psyche. The dogme rules make dark and shadowy surfaces almost unavoidable (bringing in your own lighting is forbidden) and as such the general consensus was that you better have a story that was appropriate to such a look. Scherfig ignores this bit of logic and the results are interesting if not entirely successful. She does her best to use settings with high levels of light, such as a classroom, and when shadows are unavoidable she tries to keep them soft and stable. She fights admirably against the dogme and one might even say she succeeds. The film looks an awful lot like a regular Danish picture. This does, however, beg the question of why one would then choose to make the picture dogme at all. Scherfig adamantly denies the claim that she took the project so that dogme could have its first woman director. She probably did it as a marketing ploy and perhaps as a way to challenge the ideals of dogme from within. On the former count she’s succeeded as the film has grossed over $4 million in the states. On the latter I really don’t know. I tend to think that the dogme movement has made its statement and is pretty much done at this point anyway.

In any case this film is a good deal better than your standard American romantic comedy fare. If you like films with interesting characters and happy endings you’ll probably have a good time. It might be held back by the dogme rules more than it ought to be, but at least the restrictions keep it from moving into the overblown melodrama we often come across in films with similar storylines. The film is fairly funny and very cute and it serves as further of evidence that the Danes know what they’re doing and actually care about the whole film thing. Oh, and if you haven’t seen Vinterberg’s The Celebration, the first dogme film, you should really work on that.

RATING: 57%