Italian for Beginners (2000)
Directed by Lone Scherfig
Several lonely hearts in a semi-provincial suburb of a town in Denmark use a beginner's course in Italian as the platform to meet the romance of their lives. The film, which unspools the connections and family drama shared between the students, complies with several aesthetic principles of Dogme 95 movement.
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What critics compared Italian for Beginners to
To qualify as a Dogme film writer/director Scherfig follows the Dogme Manifesto “Vow of Chastity” championed by Lars von Trier (The Idiots) by using a hand held camera for shooting the color film on location without special lighting, music, or subsequent sound dubbing.
If the existing constellation of Danish vérité exercises could be imagined, for a moment, as Snow White's dwarves, Thomas Vinterberg's inaugural entry, 1998's The Celebration , would probably be Grumpy, Lars von Trier's spastic The Idiots would be Sneezy, and Kristian Levring's torpid The King Is Alive , in effect if not in ambition, would be Sleepy.
"One Day" is based on the novel by David Nicholls, who wrote the screenplay, and is directed by Lone Scherfig, the Danish director of "An Education" and "Italian for Beginners."
Because it’s a film now, directed by Lone Scherfig, the Danish filmmaker whose “Italian for Beginners” announced a warm, new humanist talent in 2000 — and whose “An Education” confirmed that, nine years later.
Scherfig's 2000 Silver Bear-winning Italian For Beginners proved that the austere strictures of Danish filmmaking movement Dogme 95 could accommodate a fizzy, Miramax -primed, Euro-rom-com.
Even Scherfig’s break-through film Italian for Beginners (2000), made under the stylistic restrictions of the Dogme 95 movement, features a lot of grief and death amid the various romantic storylines.
Notwithstanding the considerable attractions of its stars, the characters never entirely emerge in this film from Scherfig, the maker of Italian for Beginners and An Education.
The proof was in the plodding: Although there have been a few genuinely absorbing and entertaining Dogme movies ("The Celebration" and "Italian for Beginners" leap to mind), most of them, including von Trier's own tiresome exercise "The Idiots," have been little more than pretentious, self-conscious film-school essays that have received publicity not because of any inherent interest or artistry but because their directors have usually accompanied their releases with tortured mea culpas about the vows that they broke, such as pulling back a curtain to increase a room's light.