The Rules of the Game
What is the appeal of foreign languages, specifically Italian, that gets people on a romantic bent? I have never been to Italy, always choosing to visit countries around it rather than it. Why is that, I and others have wondered? I’ve travelled extensively in my short life, visiting far off corners of the globe many only dream about. I’ve also had the privilege of living in some of the world’s most famous metropoles. Yet Italy, which is on everyone’s been there done that list, I have never experienced. This week I came to realise why: I do not know romance.
For the millions of people who’ve married, written books, honeymooned, and bought houses in Italy, it is the capital of romance. The food’s the best, the weather is wonderful and the art, oh how marvelous the art is. My Aunt goes to Italy almost every year to see opera, and as far as I can tell, to simply revel and bask in the romantic majesty of its piazza’s while sipping a spritz. I get it, ‘it’s the best.’ The only part of Italian il romanticismo I understand is the language. With enough regional dialects to rival their wine grape varieties, Italians know how to say I love you. And this charm is no better exemplified than in the Danish film Italian for Beginners, the sweetest, kindest and loveliest film I have ever seen.
‘A film should be like a stone in your shoe,’ spoke the progenitor of Dogme 95, Lars von Trier, and almost every single film to be made following Dogme’s famous ‘vows of chastity,’ is a bear to walk away from comfortably. When I came across Lone Scherfig’s 2000 film, I was both intrigued and trepidatious. I wanted to see a film by a woman from this particular Danish film movement, but I wasn’t sure I could handle, dark, brooding and melancholic. A few Google searched synopsis’s had me pressing play and for the next 90 minutes I was drawn into a world of six unusual people trying to define romance in an unromantic world. That there was no diegetic music, inconsistent lighting and shaky camera movements, proved inessential as the story was the nugget, and without the oh la la of modern filmmaking the actors could be truly human.
I am very strong in languages. I can speak a few fluently, and if you stick me in a country where I don’t speak a word of the local lingo, in a couple of months I’ll get by beautifully. Not everyone possesses this skill and surely not the people who attend the Italian course in a dreary Danish town. Their language skills are as poor as their interpersonal relationships, so they take the brave step to tackle one obstacle. With home lives filled with death, boredom and inadequacy choosing to learn a new language is a minor hurdle, one that leads to the breaking of more challenging barriers. I cannot share too many plot points because the magical unravelling of the story is why you’re in front of the screen, but the interactions of the characters with themselves and their environments is a thing of orchestral beauty on a Beethoven scale. Never again will I think of Danes as the perfect people. They’re just like you and me: hot messes trying to figure out how to get by, universal healthcare withstanding.
Italian for Beginners is an appropriate watch for the season of lent. Like Dogme 95, the films premise is about creating structure to get to the core of what’s important. Sometimes in searching we need to have rules, cairns to lead the way to what we want and ultimately need. I will never be overly gaga about Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, but I can now appreciate the romance the film creates for people. We need reckless joy and fantasy—romance, really— to attain contentment. Often it takes risk, like learning a new language or going somewhere we’ve never been before.
Image credit: UCL Film Blog
