My dear sweet God, do Russians ever grow tired of movies and novels about difficult childhoods? In the 1920s and 1930s, besprizornye—the orphans-turned-street-kids left behind by the millions who died during the post-revolutionary Civil War and famine—were common figures in Soviet film and literature, representing the aftermath of national trauma and, through their potential transformation to good Soviet citizens, the promise of Bolshevik rule.Set in a contemporary mismanaged orphanage in rural Russia, The Italian transposes this figure into modern times with the tale of Vanya, a six-year-old boy tapped for adoption by a wealthy Italian couple. The kid has his reservations, though; he'd rather try to track down his real mother. So, following in the footsteps of Neverov’s classic besprizornye tale Tashkent, City of Bread (1925), Vanya hits the road and gets into all manner of innocent mischief, ultimately demonstrating that Russians need not look abroad for salvation, but instead rely on their heartland’s latent human decency.
