Hors du monde

having missed the showtime for one of the blockbusters in the cinemaplex in this xmas season, we instead diverted to a small art-sy theather in the cultural district to see this film. After five minutes, I was already believing I was better off in the cinemaplex to watch action-packed fast moving images with special effects in surround-sound state-of-the-art stadium seating theaters, and was somewhat put off by the slow moving italian film images of a nun looking for meaning behind the find of an abandoned baby. But by the end of movie, we realized that this carefully structured and written work would have never been done in the United States. It was a moving and human touching story, in which the characters were real. If they told me that the dry cleaner workers and the nuns where not actors but actually real people, I would have believed it. It is hard to pack into 90 minutes of reel a story that looks real without having fast cuts, sound bytes, and artificiosities in verbalisms and acting, and thus transmorming a story from real to hyper-real. Spread in the movie story are still pictures of "functional" groups of people, the dry cleaner workers, the nuns, the hospital workers, the ice cream parlor workers, the janitors, the police squad. And they all contribute to give this move a special realistic bond. One important note: all the outdoor scenes are in Milan. This is unusual, as usually all outdoor scenes in Italian movies are in the Rome and surrouding area (just as Southern California is for the US).

Sister Caterina is going to take the final vows. But she finds a newborn child, Fausto, in a public park. This event creates new questions for her, for Ernesto (who thinks to be Fausto's father) that Caterina contacts trying to find Fausto's mother. The life is often confined in roles, "uniforms", that help people to survey. When something strange happens, people must go outside the uniforms to find a higher level of passion, love and life. These profound thoughts are suggested by mean of a "light" movie.

Margherita Buy is the best nun I've ever seen at the cinema.

A newborn baby is abandoned in front of a hospital wrapped in a sweater. Some non-descript guy pretending to exercise while smoking a cig and running through a park shoves the baby into the arms of Sister Caterina (Margherita Buy) who lives in a convent. Silvio Orlando plays the part of Ernesto, a hypochondriac owner of a struggling dry cleaner business in Milano. The Sister is determined to find the baby's mother, a laundry ticket on the sweater leads her to Ernesto.

At first Ernesto pleads ignorance of the sweater's owner, but the sister's persistence finally gets to him and they begin the search for the baby's mother. Meanwhile, Sister Caterina develops a fondness for the baby (named Fausto by a judge) which is at odds with convent life and frowned upon by the Mother Superior.

The friendship of Caterina and Ernesto is complicated and wrought with frustration and ultimately unrequited love. Other characters (the dry cleaner employees, Caterina's mother, Fausto's mother & father, the nuns and lovely Marina-who drops blatant hints of her desire to hook up with Ernesto that he doesn't pick up on. Fool.) all figure into the story. I won't say how this all ends. Suffice it to say this movie will tug on your heart strings.

The cinemaphotography is artistic and direct, the depth of the film is in the story and the characters. Buy and Orlando are superb, their character quirks makes the film all the more interesting. I love this movie.

This is a wonderful film directed by Giuseppe Piccioni and starring the superlative actors Margherita Buy and Silvio Orlando. A nun (Buy) finds herself in the care of an abandoned baby wrapped in a jumper with a laundry tag that leads her to laundry owner (Orlando). Thus events are set in motion which cause both the leads to re-examine their lives, their goals and their aspirations.

Rarely do films delve so deeply into the psyche of the characters but this is one film that manages to do it, largely due to a very, very well written script on which director Piccioni collaborated.

Both Margherita Buy and Silvio Orlando give restrained and well-balanced performances which are never maudlin, and which feel so real.

Another plus is the soundtrack by master pianist Ludovico Einaudi which complements the mood so beautifully.

Had I known beforehand that this was a film about a nun who finds a baby in a park, I probably would have avoided it like the plague. Yet, from this premise that promises only the worst kind of sentimentality came the best film I'd seen in years. There is sentiment, to be sure, but it is earned -- superbly so -- by the honesty and intelligence of the performances, script and direction.

This film lets us spend time with ordinary, unforgettable people facing the simple, terrible problems of everyday life, first alone, and then together. It shows us that even those who think they are "not of this world" are bound to it by the humanity we share. It will make you smile in recognition, laugh at our follies and, I dare say, sniffle a bit as well. You may well find yourself lusting for a life-affirming, earthy experience at the end and, like one of the main characters, tearing into a bar of chocolate.