The Italian (Italianetz)

It’s already 8 minutes past midnight and I have tears streaming down my face due to the incessant yawning … I thought I should write about the movie that I watched today though, before I end up postponing it and never to write anything at all about it.

I watched a movie at Palace Theatre down at Rundle Street called The Italian (Italianetz) – a movie about Vanya Solntsev, an orphan who refuses the opportunity of a better life in Italy through an adoption, but choses to go in search of his natural birth mother. In the process, Vanya has to avoid being captured by the orphan ‘madam’ who is keen to recoup her ‘investment’ or else she may have to repay the couple who have agreed to adopt the boy. The movie highlight the issue of the commercialisation of orphanage under the guise of adoption. It is a mostly sad movie, showing an orphanage that is lacking in love, and has its own social structure: a useless orphan director, an older orphan who gets the money and gifts that the orphans receive, and two compassionate but helpless orphanage helpers. It does end in an uplifting note, and worth watching indeed.

The dour and cold Russian characters in the movie were portrayed really well by the director that I was transported back to the moments when I faced some cold and impersonal Russians in some parts of the Baltics. The wooden houses and the decaying buildings shown in the movie also reminded me of the buildings and wooden houses that I saw during my travel. I remember being scolded by a Russian lady in Riga, Latvia just because I produced an incorrect coin. I wanted to buy a bottle of mineral water, and because I was not familiar with Latvian coins at that time (especially after traversing through multiple countries in a matter of weeks!), I ended up giving her an Estonian Kroon coin amongst the Latvian Santims. She scolded me in Russian, which I could not understand at all, rather than showing an understanding that I’m a tourist in a foreign country. 🙄 Ah well!

Time for me to go to bed and enjoy the comfort of my doona!