My Name is Tanino (2002)

My Name is Tanino is an Italian coming-of-age comedy which never reached the States and is not available on North American DVD.

So why the hell am I watching an Italian DVD and writing about this film?

The primary reason is that it features topless nudity from a young Canadian starlet named Rachel McAdams who was virtually an unknown when she did this movie, but is now on her way toward A-list stardom after a string of successes like Mean Girls, Wedding Crashers, Red-Eye and especially The Notebook.

McAdams plays Sally, an American student who is vacationing in Italy when she encounters a helpful young Italian teenager. They spend some time together and exchange a brief kiss, all of which is just casual for her, but is built up in his mind as a great romantic opportunity, to the extent that he leaves Italy to track her down in America, with comical consequences. She is embarrassed to see him on her doorstep and tries to get rid of him as gently as possible, but a concatenation of circumstances leads to his being invited to stay with her family. This creates even more outrageous circumstances which lead Sally's father to assume that Tanino is the long-suspected lover of Sally's mother. Poor, clueless Tanino ends up fleeing the house at rifle-point.

Tanino, who is a film student back in Italy, then spends the rest of his American holiday making a pilgrimage to see the great director "Chenowsky," during which he passes through various Italian-American households and experiences more comic misadventures and cultural misunderstandings.

It seems like a good movie. I enjoyed the situations, and I could follow the movie in a general sense, but only a small portion of it is in English and there are no subtitles. (Well, to be more precise, there are Italian subtitles during the English portions!) Even Rachel McAdams performs most of her lines in Italian, even in the American scenes, because Tanino's grasp of English is as bad as my grasp of Italian, which is to say somewhere between zero and rudimentary. McAdams speaks to Tanino in Italian, and also has to translate her family's English for Tanino. I therefore can't offer much in terms of analysis since I couldn't enjoy the dialogue, or understand the jokes, and I didn't even look at the second disk full of special features because I knew I'd be lost.

The IMDb has several votes and comments (mostly quite positive), and RAI's English language review (very enthusiastic about the first half, disappointed with the conclusion) is here