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'The Italian'

BY JAN STUART | Newsday Staff Writer

January 19, 2007

In the pop mythology according to Oliver Twist and Broadway's "Annie," there isn't a moppet worth his or her salt who wouldn't gladly trade the brutal familiarity of an orphanage for the luxe strangeness of an adoptive household. Which is why we can't help but be knocked for a loop when the 6-year-old subject of "The Italian," given a shot at escaping into a life of bourgeois comfort, makes himself as scarce as can be.

While there is nothing foreboding about the kindly Italian couple who want to adopt the wispy Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov), one could find plenty of cause to shun the fleabag rural orphanage, its indifferent headmaster and the thuggish children's gang that rules out of the boiler room. If Vanya risks the whip and the wrath of his peers to avoid an enviable fate, it is because he believes in his heart that he belongs with the mother who abandoned him when he was a baby.

What begins as another bleak depiction of hard-knock waifs and grasping grown-ups soon spins into a breathless cat-and-mouse, as the slippery boy embarks on a monomaniacal mission to track down his real mom. The single-minded ingenuity with which Vanya pursues his goal informs the whole of Andrei Kravchuk's unstoppable drama, which holds us with a timeless simplicity and narrative purity. Kravchuk's No. 1 asset is the saucer-eyed Spiridonov, who gives off those blinding rays of natural talent that render everyone around him effectively invisible.