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).
