A vacationing American couple mistakenly believe their rural Italian
hosts have sinister plans for them.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Brian Crano, David Joseph Craig
Starring: Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Morgan Spector, Amanda Seyfried, Nunzia
Schiano, Eleanora Romandini, Paolo Romano
There's a popular meme on social media intended to illustrate the
difference between the foreign policies of the US under Republican and
Democratic administrations. The image representing Republicans shows a
plane bearing the US flag dropping a payload of bombs. In the
accompanying Democratic image the stars and stripes has been replaced by
a rainbow flag. I Don't Understand You, the feature debut of writer/directors and married couple David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, plays like a sly riff on that
interpretation of how liberal Americans view the rest of the world as a
less enlightened place populated by primitive people with backwards
views.
The movie stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells as Dom and Cole, a married gay couple in the process of trying to
adopt an infant child. They've pinned their hopes on surrogate mother
Candice (Amanda Seyfried) choosing them as the right couple to
become parents to the child she's soon to birth, and while awaiting an
answer they fly to Italy to celebrate their anniversary. There some
local family friends treat Dom and Cole to an anniversary gift of a
private dinner at an exclusive farmhouse restaurant out in the Italian
equivalent of the boonies.
When the hapless pair get their car stuck in mud on the way to the
farmhouse, the night rapidly goes downhill. Unable to speak the local
language, Dom and Cole find themselves in what they mistakenly believe
to be a sinister situation, and the bodies begin to pile up.
I Don't Understand You treads similar ground to the cult horror-comedy Tucker and Dale vs Evil. In that movie the ingrained prejudice of a group of city slickers
leads them to assume a pair of affable rednecks are out to murder them.
Craig and Crano's film does something similar, with Dom and Cole fearing
the worst of the Italian yokels they encounter, assuming they're a bunch
of rabid homophobes when they're arguably more progressive than the
average American. Much of the comedy comes from Dom and Cole's inability
to understand Italian and the audience's advantage of having the
language translated for us through subtitles. The words we read contrast
wildly with the ignorant assumptions made by the paranoid Dom and Cole,
who mistakenly come to believe they're in a life-threatening scenario
that they'll only survive by resorting to savagery.
With most of the action playing out within the confines of a
farmhouse, I Don't Understand You is essentially a chamber comedy, and the interplay of Kroll and
Rannells apes that of classic comic duos like Laurel & Hardy and
Abbott & Costello. But the comedy here is of the blackest variety
imaginable, with the film's gormless protagonists committing an escalating
series of violent atrocities in the belief that they're in a
kill-or-be-killed situation.
Dom and Cole's justification for their actions echoes the sort of
"better over there than over her" mentality that makes Americans, and
westerners in general, numb to the crimes committed for the dubious
purpose of keeping us safe back home. It's the couple's belief that
their Italian hosts are inferior and unsophisticated that makes it
easier for them to plunge kitchen knives into their backs or whack them
across the head with shovels. It's their determination to become parents
that fuels Dom and Cole's descent into psychopathy, convincing
themselves that being good dads in the future will somehow make up for
their crimes.
The idea of being asked to laugh at Americans killing a bunch of locals
on foreign soil might understandably prove a turn-off for many potential
viewers, but we're very much laughing AT Dom and Cole here rather than
WITH them, and it's clear that despite any differences in social
attitudes, it's the Americans who are the villains here. The joke is
that Dom and Cole are convinced that they're the good guys, that the
foreigners they're executing pose a threat to the child to they hope to
raise. While Dom and Cole keep telling themselves they'll make great
dads, we can only laugh at their delusion given the horrors we witness
at their hands.
That said, by its nature the film puts us in the position of revelling
in Dom and Cole's descent into madness, and there are several points
where we laugh at the sort of things that we probably should gasp in
horror at instead. With so many movies portraying gay characters in a
saintly and patronising manner, it's refreshing that a pair of queer
filmmakers have made a movie that so loudly states "hey, we can be
assholes too."
I Don't Understand You is the very definition of a bad taste comedy, but its most
distasteful gag comes in the closing credits: you won't believe who
serves as a "consulting producer" on this comedy about Americans
murdering people in Italy.
I Don't Understand You is in
US/CAN cinemas from June 6th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be
announced.
