Sex, Lies And Mothmen

By Richard Schickel; Richard Corliss

ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS

In a cold climate, they long for love: a newly widowed minister, a hairdresser, a bakery clerk, a restaurant manager, a hotel functionary, a cook. Once a week they take Italian lessons--even the cook, who is, in fact, Italian. The language is, after all, one of passion's vernaculars, capable of warming even these chilled and distracted souls.

One of them is bad tempered; another is terminally diffident; two are burdened with awful parents--one permanently angry, another alcoholic. The minister is losing touch with God, and frankly, the Italian woman really ought to be studying Danish so that she can articulate her unlikely ardor for the shy tutor in his native language.

What's lovely about Italian for Beginners is not the way things work out for everyone but that the route to those consummations is so persuasive, with the cast as unactorish as any you've ever seen in a movie. And writer-director Lone Scherfig abides by the stern confines of "Dogma 95," the filmmaking theory promulgated by a group of Danish directors in 1995 that forbids, among other things, musical scores, artificial light and settings, even sound looping. Who knew that charm could survive--let alone prosper--under those strictures?

But the sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice--snappy dialogue, wacky situations--but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another. And gently, insinuatingly rebelling against their dismal fate. --By Richard Schickel

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES

To the few who can see them, they look like...well...giant moths. Hence, the title The Mothman Prophecies. Their business is to warn the world of impending disasters. The possibility that their auguries may be of the self-fulfilling variety--that they may actually cause the chaos they predict--hovers unspoken as we watch director Mark Pellington's entertainingly eerie film.

In it, the odd occurrences center on Point Pleasant, on the Ohio River in West Virginia. What Washington Post reporter John Klein (Richard Gere) is doing there he can't explain. He is not on the way to his original destination, Richmond, Va. Nor can he or the local police officer (Laura Linney) understand all the weird sights, sounds and phone calls the townsfolk keep reporting. All Klein knows is that the goings-on resemble a vision his late wife had just before succumbing to a brain tumor.

This story is being promoted as "true," although the only fully documented fact in Richard Hatem's script is the disaster--a collapsing bridge--that brings the movie to its climax. Actually it plays more like a good X-Files episode--full of plausible details placed in the service of paranormal (not to say paranoid) whoppers. But director Pellington's touch is light and flickering, and his actors are solid and persuasive. If you let yourself go with The Mothman Prophecies, it is--in its lumpen, serious way--sort of fun. --R.S.

STORYTELLING

Moms have a special name for lying: telling stories. We all engage in storytelling to get us out of tough situations. But only Todd Solondz (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness) keeps making films about the lies at the heart of modern life. This time his expose sounds like a confession. Is he twisting his own "truths"?

His new hymn to middle-class mendacity comes in two parts. The first tale, Fiction, is about Vi, a college student (Selma Blair) who fibs her way into a brutal liaison with her prof (Robert Wisdom), a black novelist with a Pulitzer. The power of his fame and his race is to her a threat and an aphrodisiac. As for the post-sex short story she writes in revenge...well, that's just Vi's fiction, and her autobiographical heroine gets ragged by another female student: "She's just a spoiled suburban white girl with a Benetton rainbow complex."

Part II, Non-Fiction, puts the typical Solondz brood--screwed-up parents (John Goodman and Julie Hagerty) and sulky kid (Mark Webber)--into a cinema-verite project by a desperate auteur (Paul Giamatti). The film's editor has a withering critique: "It seems glib and familiar to make fun of how idiotic all these people are."

Does Solondz feel remorse for libeling his own kind? He might need to if his portraits didn't have the gift of dark wit, the ring of social truth. One makes allowances for a master storyteller. --By Richard Corliss