An earlier posting compared this film with Spielberg's "AI", a robotic boy with artificial intelligence with the capacity to form emotional bonds, a sort of interesting point, as this film itself aims a bit lower than the intelligentsia level, more at gut level emotions, since its main character is a young boy in a rundown Russian orphanage who spurns the rich Italian couple who wants to adopt him in favor of going on a treacherous journey to find his mother. And to throw a few more logs on the flames of passion, the orphanage's director collects a nice sum for adoptions of poor Russian youth by wealthy foreigners, and hence sets out with her part-time lover and assistant to trail and apprehend the kid with the help of the police, whom she pays off, as he searches for his mom. It doesn't fail to be moving, but in the department of originality, it utilizes a lot of the usual devices as it goes through its well-presented drama.
Review of The Italian
