
Like many who visit the beautiful country, hardworking gay lovers Dom and Cole are on the road. They meet and decide that the world is against them. Being Americans, one gets married legally, adopts, and does everything a straight couple can do, and true as it is for a pair like them, history is not black and white and so what they see is endless rejection and rejection. What is it called? Rejection, but the embrace Harsh.
Having been through quite similar things themselves, writers Brian Crano and David Craig loosely based their story I Don’t Understand You on the events of Dom and Cole’s lives to give them a new perspective, where everything is going so well until it’s not. They are informed that their surrogate, whom they were in contact with for quite some time, has finally been made available to them. Outside Philadelphia, an old family friend arranged for them to eat out in a secluded Italian place. And there it is, la vita è bella.
However, as the vacation progresses, this sweet escapade of Eat, Gay, Love takes a nasty turn. All of a sudden, there are more and more corpses, and the couple cannot be sure whether they have escaped from a recent hate attack or have actually turned a hate attack on their quite friendly hosts. And still, they stab the air with knives while muttering words like You are going to be dey ud. Dom and Cole seem to have been under siege their entire lives, and so such signals are understandable even if they appear to be misinterpretations at first glance. And because they know nothing about the local culture and have no idea how the language works, it all rather tends to escalate incredibly quickly.
Watching a movie that displays the worst of humanity, the couple Dom and Cole make out this time, and it even looks fun (but there is a lot that would get spoiled in this review). In any case Don’t Understand You is not about how these two would fair in front of a judge and jury. Kroll and Rannells played the couple as one with the world’s wrath making even the audience uneasy about the opposers except Krol and Rannells who seem mad but quite lovable and humorous all while being neurotic with public affection.
Teri and the film’s directors are married just like the main characters of the story. It only means that however intense or concerned it is for the characters, it is most likely biographical. As such, it’s also one of the reasons the film works Dom and Cole are out of their depths throughout the film, but it remains believable. The audience can understand that these flawed would-be parents want to have kids so badly. That objective sets everything else the world throws at them, be it a hotel clerk who misunderstands their need for a honeymoon suite and rudely importunes them from proceeding further to formal intimidation.
The couple manages to get as far as their dinner reservation when they decide to steer the rental car through a private driveway and end up stuck in a ditch. When the surly landowner arrives with a shotgun, they expect the worst. It doesn’t help, either, that they didn’t bother learning Italian (Dom was able to use Duolingo for a short while, but he is incapable of speaking). Looking at their faces, I can only imagine what they are thinking Two guys who were this close to becoming fathers are going to be either dead or lost somewhere in Italy.
Luckily, before the panic stricken twosome can do anything, the rather abrupt stranger opens the doors of the restaurant for them. It turns out the natives are a little less antagonistic than what they had anticipated. At this point, the co-directors Crano and Craig lower the tension to a degree where anything can happen. Dom and Cole cannot help but be impressed with the rustic restaurateur, Francesca (‘White Lotus’ veteran Eleonora Romandini), who they’re certain is not claiming to be an expert. Their imaginations, however, get the better of them, with the duo mistaking their knife-wielding hostess and her macho son (Morgan Spector) as violent threats.
In tone, I Don’t Understand You possesses the bleak anticipatory atmosphere that characterizes the best moments of any Danny DeVito film (one thinks of Ruthless People or The War of the Roses). However, the script’s basic message of cynicism hardly holds any water. One has to remember that a pregnancy stranger (Amanda Seyfried, who appeared in Crano’s short Dog Food and here appeared via a number of video conference calls) is very much excited about selling them her unborn fetus. And that Francesca is undoubtedly thrilled about the prospect of entertaining a gay couple which her own son has never had the happiness to experience. If only Dom and Cole were able to understand her language or at least the subtitles which explain to the audience what they can see that’s lost to the characters.
Instead, they become fearful in a negative way. This section of the film, where chaos blooms through cultural misunderstanding, is somewhat unconvincing. The writers acknowledge the manner in which gays brought up in straitened circumstances have to adopt all the more circumspection about themselves than say, normal persons, which sounds almost like a post traumatic condition. But the comedy appears to be contrived to the extent that a less dramatized version of the directors’ so-called Italian celebration, sans the civil casualties, would have sufficed. The film presents the couple’s behavior in such a light as to emphasize their desire to have children. That their being allowed to be not just flawed, but mad, is a reflection of how far we have advanced.
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