Italian for Beginners. Written and directed by Lone Scherfig. With Anders W. Berthelsen, Peter Gantzler, Lars Kaalund, Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Anette Støvelbæk, and Sara Indrio Jensen. A Miramax Films release, in Danish and Italian with English subtitles; 90 minutes. At the the Avon.

Scandinavian filmmaking has never been noted for its sense of humor or its heartwarming romance. It's given us heartwrenching drama (Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann); it's served up period soap opera (Bo Widerberg's Elvira Madigan) and softcore porn (I Am Curious Yellow, etc.). Lately, Denmark has propagated the ultra-serious Dogme 95 movement. Now, from the first woman to direct a Dogme film, Lone Scherfig, we get the first Dogme date movie. Italian for Beginners is no beginner when it 0comes to understanding Italy. It brims over with slancio (which is to say it phrases like Frank Sinatra) and tripudio (that exuberant leap of joy executed by Alessandro Del Piero or Francesco Totti after scoring a goal for the Italian national side). Most of all, it's got heart. Call it the first Danish-Italian cinematic valentine.

Dogme 95, in case you've forgotten, is that 1995 manifesto from Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that attempted to take moviemaking back to basics. Location shooting and handheld cameras were required; films were to take place in the here and now, without background music or special effects or "superficial matters" (like "murder" or "weapons"). In other words, back to Bergman. But though Vinterberg's The Celebration was a Bergman-like triumph, the Dogme films that followed -- Lars von Trier's The Idiots, Søren Kragh Jacobsen's Mifune, and Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive -- proved only that it's as easy to make mediocre movies on a small budget as it is on a large one. With the fifth Dogme film to reach America (the 12th overall), Lone Scherfig proves you can make an intelligent, attractive movie for less than $1 million.

The set-up is Dogme-simple, focusing on six ordinary people in a small town near Copenhagen. Widower Andreas (Anders W. Berthelsen) is the new pastor, having been brought in as a temporary replacement for the irascible Pastor Wredmann, who's been suspended after pushing his organist out of the organ loft. Hal-Finn (Lars Kaalund) is a former football player who runs the sports-center restaurant and berates the customers; his friend Jørgen Mortensen (Peter Gantzler) is a receptionist at the hotel that owns the restaurant. Then we have the ladies: Karen (Ann Eleonora Jørgensen) runs a one-woman low-tech hair salon/barbershop; Olympia (Anette Støvelbæk) works behind a pastry counter; and Giulia (Sara Indrio Jensen) is a waitress at the restaurant.

The plot trappings are also elementary. Jørgen's abusive boss orders him to fire Hal-Finn; Karen has an alcoholic mother to deal with, Olympia an abusive ailing father. There's no lack of grit: in the course of the film three persons die, and we're shown two black-comic funeral services. But it's the characters' inability to talk to one another that the movie turns on. Simple questions don't always get answered directly: when Andreas asks Beate, the church worker who's showing him around, whether she's married, she replies, "No, but I'm taking Italian lessons." And obvious explanations aren't offered: when Karen has to interrupt Hal-Finn's haircut to go to the hospital, she doesn't stop to tell him why. Andreas and Pastor Wredmann are worlds apart when it comes to talking theology, and Giulia, who's Italian, understands only a smattering of Danish (though, as you find out in a key scene near the end, it's a bigger smattering than you thought). She has a hilarious scene with Jørgen's jerk of a boss (who looks like a Hitler youth graduate): he thinks she's asking what kind of macho car he drives, but actually she's inviting him into the kitchen to see what she can do to male anatomy with a very sharp knife.

What brings everyone together, eventually, is the title institution, an adult-education Italian class that's Scherfig's metaphor for trying to communicate. The proceedings aren't exactly Berlitz-intensive -- no one advances much past "Dove è la Piazza San Marco?" But Scherfig keeps sneaking souvenirs of Italy into her film, like Andreas's Maserati, and the "Traviata" (some kind of umbrella drink) the hotel bartender gives Jørgen by mistake, and the opera snippets (played on a piano or hummed by the characters, since background music is a Dogme no-no): "Un bel dí," "O mio babbino caro," Musetta's Waltz. And though our heroes may not learn to speak Italian, they do learn to be Italian, to enjoy life, to warm one another. Romance blooms (I'm not going to spoil your enjoyment by spilling the details), we find out why Olympia is such a klutz, two of the characters turn out to be related, one of them comes into some money, and everyone winds up in Venice, where life is indeed beautiful.

What validates the Dogme concept here is not Scherfig's observance of those silly rules but her command of basics like casting, characterization, and detail (stay to the very end and you'll get a laugh out of the final credit card). Andreas at first seems insecure, even wimpy, but what's with the Maserati he drives and the tattoo on his left shoulder and his deceased schizophrenic wife? And check out the way Scherfig uses football jerseys to define Hal-Finn: he starts out wearing a Danish national-team shirt, but after he's sacked from the restaurant, he ditches it in favor of Juventus (the Dallas Cowboys of Italian football). Or the way the other three women in the Italian class remain a ghostly, unsettling presence: Beate, who seems drawn to Andreas; Lise, a nurse in the hospital where Karen's mother is sent; and Kristin, a real-estate agent. They're all attractive, they all go to Italy (making up a Dantean party of nine), and at the end they all remain alone.

In the end, for Scherfig, the basic of basics is the human face. So we have Jørgen hesitant as he tries to get up the nerve to ask the woman he likes for a date; Karen flashing her mysterious half-smile; Andreas with his odd combination of puzzlement and helpfulness; Olympia frustrated and uncomprehending as she drops yet another tray of pastries; Hal-Finn boorish and yet kind; Giulia radiant as she thanks the Virgin Mary for an answered prayer. Scherfig keeps pushing her camera in her actors' faces, and they respond by being there for her, and for one another. That goes beyond Dogme; it's the basics of great cinema.

Issue Date: March 22 - 28, 2002