The Italian (2005)

Andrey Kravchuk uses a six-year-old orphan’s quest to find his mother to project a corrupted, predatory and deracinated Russia. 

Little Vanya resists adoption by an Italian couple because he wants his mother to be able to find him. Against all odds he finds her. In an improbable happy ending, she takes him in and his friend Anton from the orphanage is sent to the Italian couple in his stead. Unlike his other friend’s desperate prostitute mother, who ends up a drunken suicide, Vanya’s mother has a home and a job as nurse, so she can now take care of him.

The film’s key theme is the predatory nature of everyone around Vanya. As an orphanage staff member reads from Kipling’s Jungle Book, Vanya is the Mowgli figure raised amid jungle beasts with an occasional kindness to remind him of what humanity should be. There's the girl who teaches him to read, the kindly first orphanage's caretaker, the occasional sympathetic stranger. But the good here is the individuals not groups.

In the orphanage the older boys have institutionalized their predation, with vicious beatings and the exploitation of the vulnerable. The girls are sent out as prostitutes and the young boys have to turn in their meagre carwash earnings. It’s a parody of the socialist community, as the girl who helps Vanya escape says the pooled money belongs to all of them so she could take it. It’s the empty form of socialism without the generous spirit. Though she virtuously teaches Vanya to read and tries to rescue him, her instincts are also predatory as she seeks to exploit anyone else she can. For all her criminality, the image of her in high heels, shot skirts, negotiating the winter ice is of fragile waifhood.

The toughs who rob and beat Vanya at the train tracks are an outlaw version of the orphanage’s young exploiters. They won’t give him any break but in the bones. The teenage gang that saves Vanya from the orphanage’s manager are a third group of semi-organized violence, hanging out bored, eager for a fight. The three groups of young people form an aimless, spiritless and needy generation with no values or purpose. That's a bleak vision of Russia’s future. 

The orphanage administration comprises three adults. Madam is a corrupt capitalist, obsessed with profiteering from the adoptions, happy to spread bribe money around to get her way. One colleague is a beaten man, rueful of his failed chance to have been a pilot. The other is a more aggressive brute, with a sexual interest in Madam, but Vanya wins his sympathy by slashing open his own arm in desperation. His beating by the gang may have eased his brutality towards Vanya.    

The title — Vanya’s new nickname at the orphanage — is ironic because the boy doesn’t want to leave cold wet Russia for the warmth of Italy. He wants his mother, who ultimately provides a warmth deeper than the climate.

The closing closeup on Vanya evokes the famous last shot in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Where Jean-Pierre Leaud stares out on an empty sea, uncertain, here Vanya beams at his beautiful blonde mother and spells out the happy ending in a voiceover letter to friend Anton. 

     Against the bleak social landscape the film finds a surprising hope in the young star’s performance. His face and body provide emotional animation and he proves of increasing resourcefulness in making his way back through enemies and abusers to his maternal roots. In finding his mother he finds the old Mother Russia, an ideal lost amid the current corruption.