Word: unactorish
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What's lovely about Italian for Beginners is not the way things work out for everyone but that the route to those consummations is so persuasive, with the cast as unactorish as any you've ever seen in a movie. And writer-director Lone Scherfig abides by the stern confines of "Dogma 95," the filmmaking theory promulgated by a group of Danish directors in 1995 that forbids, among other things, musical scores, artificial light and settings, even sound looping. Who knew that charm could survive--let alone prosper--under those strictures...
Director Christian de Chalonge tells Antonio's story in straightforward documentary style, avoiding dramatic climaxes and resisting all the opportunities for easy sentimentality. The casting is superbly unactorish. Churlish hotel clerks, irritated factory officials and the nurse's sleek young friends making banal conversation about the beauties of Portugal-all look their roles and read their lines without a hint of theatrical emphasis or timing. The Portuguese peasants are clearly not actors at all. but no professional performer could hope to match the direct simplicity of their response to the tragedy that surrounds them. Best...
...soldiers are convincingly unactorish, and the camera watches them well, making dramatic use of focus shifts (the credits list a focus technician as well as a cameraman and a photography director). At 28, British Director Peter Collinson (The Penthouse and Up the Junction), who doubled as co-producer of The Long Day's Dying, has the technical skills of moviemaking well in hand. Time now to concentrate on the intangibles. Like taste...
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