Italian for Beginners
It seems the director is the same woman who did “An Education”, indeed both movies are very female centered. Obviously these are love stories, but except for Giulia we actually see the female characters here much more developed than the male ones, who have comparably less harsh problems and generally sort of lack depth.
But in general, I like the characters very much; all of them. Jorgen and Giulia are the best, oh my goodness. I felt seriously touched when he held that amazingly simple yet unusual monologue. Everything just cries “It’s a disaster” to you but when I saw their happy faces, I couldn’t help but feel happy myself.
Danish comedies are just so… similar in a sense, and refreshing compared to everything else? About everything I have seen sort of fell into a similar pattern: Very black humor, an ensemble cast, relatively unknown yet very good actors and finally, unhappy and slightly crazy characters, often with health problems but always “your neighbor next door” type people. This movie is the only one with love stories but aside from that, the topics of death, your place in society and how to deal with it… they are all present, and the Dogme 95 principle makes you feel like it really could have happened anywhere.
The end came as a little bit of a surprise though. I absolutely did not expect any music, as their presence is unusual in Dogme 95 films. But then again, I suppose it makes sense that they would play something in a touristy restaurant in Venice. It was a great end.
Thanks to web.archive.org there is quite a nice list of all Dogme films, of which I have seen “Festen” and “Idioterne” and I am still very interested in “Mifune” and “Lovers”. As for the other movies, I have the bad feeling that most Dogme films are just not very good, which ended up being one of the reasons why the concept is not all that popular. It is rare for a film to have a storytelling as strong as the 3 I have seen, including “Italian for Beginners”.