Movies about small, isolated towns tend to be fun, and the charming new Italian film, A World Apart by Riccardo Milani, which opened on Thursday in theaters throughout Israel, is no exception.
A World Apart is about Michele (Antonio Albanese), an elementary-school teacher from Rome facing burnout who requests – and gets – a transfer to a town in the mountains of the southern Abruzzo region east of Rome. It plays in some ways like an Italian version of Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, about a teacher in rural Bhutan, crossed with one of those British small-town movies, like Waking Ned Devine.
It’s an interesting coincidence that Milani is married to Paola Cortellesi, an actress whose directorial debut, There’s Still Tomorrow, just opened here earlier this month. While A World Apart is a far more conventional and predictable movie than Cortellesi’s, it has the same affection for its characters.
What’s novel about this story is that this town is not just small but tiny, with just over 350 inhabitants. Young people don’t want to stay in this isolated area, where there are heavy snowfalls all winter, so the elementary school has just one classroom with a handful of kids of different ages.
The government wants to close the school, thinking it isn’t worth it to run it on such a small scale, which the inhabitants feel will be the death knell for their town. Without a school, the few families who have managed to make a go of it will be forced to leave – and their way of life, which they constantly explain by using the phrase, “It’s a mountain thing,” will disappear.
But the principal, Agnese (Virginia Raffaele), isn’t going to let the school go without a fight, so she has pushed to get a new teacher assigned to the school – although the locals don’t have much hope that Michele will make it through the school year. Just as in Lunana, most of the teachers assigned to this school don’t last a month.
BUT MICHELE is different. He is charmed by the beauty of nature, even though he is so unused to dealing with this kind of extreme winter that he shows up in a pair of leather loafers. And there is a lot of nature to get used to, with wolves that howl even by day, deer that aren’t caught in the headlights but lope by – and of course, the almost constant snow.
His students are a much sweeter bunch than the spoiled bullies he taught in Rome, although they are also wiser than their years. While he has no idea how to start a fire in the wood-burning stove that heats his cabin, one of his charges does. Another helps his father change Michele’s inadequate tires. But they’re still typical 21st century kids in other ways. Michele takes them on a nature walk where they point out all kinds of flora and fauna to him, as few city kids could, but when he asks what they want to be when they grow up, they answer, “YouTubers,” in unison.
The movie has many genuinely funny moments, such as when Agnese gives the mandatory sex ed talk where she reads from a script mentioning all kinds of gender identities. At the end, the sensible kids ask, “But just you and you can make a baby?” pointing to her and Michele.
Michele’s enthusiasm for his new position stems in part from his commitment to saving the planet from climate change. He tells his students that they must change the world before dinner, taking the phrase from Jonathan Safran Foer’s We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Their wizened parents just laugh it off, and so does the movie at first, although Milani’s script goes back and forth between showing respect for Michele’s earnest passion and lampooning it.
Agnese is devoted to all the students who have passed through the school, even the ones who are now adolescents. She lauds the ambition of one who has flummoxed his parents who assume resignedly that he will soon move away by announcing that he wants to keep the family farm running. The problem of adolescent depression in this community comes up but is resolved a little too neatly. In fact, most of the plot turns out exactly the way you think it will.
WHEN THE local school board threatens to close the school in a few weeks, Michele and Agnese come up with two ruses. The first involves getting refugee children from Ukraine and immigrants from Morocco to enroll. They are doing the right thing for self-interested reasons, but the movie doesn’t explore this issue much and it feels odd for it to be raised only to be dropped.
The other is classifying a basically normal kid who is on the weak side as being disabled so they can open a special ed classroom – and getting one of the old men in the village to be his teacher, which gives the man an opportunity to reminisce about the town’s history.
Bringing back memories
All of the character actors – including Albanese, an actor known mostly for comedy – are endearing, as is usually the case in such movies. Watching the film here and now raised some thoughts: first of all, how wonderful it is to see a snow-covered village as end-of-summer temperatures soar. It reminded me of being stuck in New York in the summer and going out to an air-conditioned theater showing escapist movies, and how the audience would let out a collective sigh when a beautiful beach or alpine landscape was shown on screen.
The second is how the plight of the villagers fighting to keep their town populated resonates at a time when huge swaths of Israel, in both the South and the North, have become ghost towns for nearly a year due to the war.
The same day I watched A World Apart, I saw the mayor of one of the evacuated towns near the northern border interviewed and he spoke about his worry that its young couples will never return and that the schools and preschools will close for good. It made the story in A World Apart even sweeter than it would have been in quieter times.