Boston-bound The last time I saw Lone Scherfig was Monday September 10, 2001, at the Lenox Hotel, at the first of two receptions for the Boston Film Festival (the second, scheduled for the following evening, was cancelled). She and her seven-year-old daughter, Feline, were set to leave the next day, and, well, I’ll let her tell you what happened next. "I was leaving Boston to go to Washington on September 11, but first I took Feline on the Duck Tour. The captain told everyone on the loudspeaker, and we saw people leaving the buildings as we drove back through Boston that morning. The situation got more and more Kafka-esque as we little by little discovered that we could not go home [to Denmark]. "Luckily we were installed at the Lenox Hotel, where they told us we could stay as long as we wanted. Especially considering that everyone must have been in a much worse situation than we, they were very warm and kind. We felt more and more at home, real eider-down comforters as everyone has in Denmark are rare in other countries. We went to church, and I tried to minimize television so as not to scare my daughter. I kept dreaming that a plane flew through the ceiling and kept thinking of how to find a reasonable way to explain something to a seven-year-old that is still very hard to understand for us all, perhaps even harder when you are not American. In the evening we went out, looked at the candles, heard the singing and the sirens, and then I decided to make the best of the fact that I suddenly had all the time I always need with my daughter. "I like Boston very much. We enjoyed the architecture, the museums, the restaurants, and the incredible kindness that came from a place that seems to have a strange cocktail of left-wing intellectualism and old-fashioned very good manners. Emily Post meets Emma Goldman. You could almost feel the values changing after this shock that made everyone more fragile and caring within a few hours. I would very much like to go back." Returning to Scherfig’s exquisite film, I observe that it was rather longer when it showed at the Berlin Film Festival last year. What happened? "I have, in collaboration with Miramax, cut a American version of the film, where some moments that are too ‘Danish’ are cut out. It is hard to see exactly where as the film is trimmed at least 50 different places, especially at the beginning. The Jørgen Mortensen ‘promotion’ scene is out, some of the religious discussions are gone, and the two awful parents of the girls have been shaved a bit as well." I have to ask about Sara Indrio Jensen, who plays the Italian waitress Giulia. At the Berlin Film Festival last year, her performance totally eclipsed the more celebrated one given by Monica Bellucci in Malèna, and if I were a director, I’d hardly trade her for Marisa Tomei. Yet in real life she’s a pop star; Italian for Beginners was her first film. "Sara is a composer and drummer, doing quite well with her own little band. We all like her very much, she is the youngest in the whole group, and she has been able to travel a bit with the film, to Spain to receive the award in Valladolid, and to France for the Paris opening." And Scherfig’s next project? "We will start shooting Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself in Glasgow in six weeks. The crew as the same as for Italian for Beginners, but the film takes place in Scotland and is cast with Scottish actors." Let’s hope they all speak Italian. — JG

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 comes 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.