I Don’t Understand You
I Don’t Understand You
I Don’t Understand You: In a manner reminiscent of the supporting cast in the second season of “The White Lotus,” rich gay couple Dom and Cole have given the impression they are the world’s target. Even though, as Americans, they live in history when they can marry, adopt, and act as straight people do, they also know that this wasn’t possible before and so picture rejection and homophobia everywhere. They expect the worst and manage to somehow get it.
This documentary is an encapsulation of the humorous yet vividly scary life adventures of Brian Crano and David Craig turned into a film. So “I don’t understand you” is based on the catty black comedy which engages the audience and induces them into laughter. In one of the stretches, the film focuses on Dom and Cole’s relationship and how they separate and connect easily, until one day something shifts in this balance.
And so the couple is sitting in some café on their anniversary in Italy and starts receiving phone calls with unexpected news. There’s one kid who’s going to be born soon and they really want to adopt him, only once, if memory serves, the adoption never happened. An acquaintance of their family brought them to a private restaurant and so forth. Everything becomes a puzzle. Everything is beautiful.
As the holiday progresses, so does the plot drama, which began as an ‘Eat, gay and love’ movie. There is a significant increase in the number of dead bodies. The couple themselves cannot say whether they have escaped or committed a hate crime, while the host family is almost impossibly pleasant, the sweethearts argue. However, they are hostile and threaten: “Wait till you are dead.” For instance, for people who have suffered all life abuse, envisage Dom and Cole as feeling they have been every such sign is badly skewed. And since they are not really culturally or linguistically integrated all that much, it all gets messy very quick.
If seen from the perspective as they are, Dom and Cole, are not morally correct individual at particular sides of the film (but this is a spoiler by which the film looses its character so we will leave it out here). But then again, “I Don’t Understand You” is not about when the hammer of justice is lowered, vise versa for these images, one has to believe, is more entertaining than any legal proceedings. Kroll and Rannells give it their all, playing the couple with colossal ‘us against the world’ conviction. Engaging the audience, even when their overreaction and awkwardly cute or unintentional public displays of affection are up for question.
In the case of these protagonists, both their writer-directors are quite literally in a marriage since it can be assumed that the present underlying dilemmas are of their own life, this being taken into context and posing even as exaggerated. That’s one reason the movie works: Things really do get out of control for Dom and Cole, but within the scope of what is plausible.
These people, who are not perfect and don’t really care, want a baby. That aim makes everything else, from misunderstandings they wish to interpret as micro-traumas – like appeasing a hotel clerk for the reservation of the ‘honeymoon’ suite only for hush-hush bed covers to be used – to threats more advanced.
In the process of going to the place where they had earlier fixed a date for their dinner, the two drive a rented car onto a private driveway only to get the car stuck. When the ill-tempered owner of the land, appeared with a shotgun, they had really nowhere to turn.
It is not exactly a surprise to them that they didn’t learn Italian (Dom tried to do so through Duolingo but was unsuccessful). Judging by their expression, we understand what these two think: They were this close to being fathers and now they are going to be killed or rescued somewhere in Italy amongst abandoned cattle.
Luckily, before the alarmed couple can do anything, the grumpy man drops them off at the restaurant. Perhaps, the people there don’t seem to be as unfriendly as they thought. Now, co directors of this motion picture, Crano and Craig increase the stakes so that it can go either way. Dom and Cole go on to imbue Francesca, the rustic restaurateur, played by ‘White Lotus’ star Eleonora Romandini, with their romantic fantasies, only for their fantasies to take a different direction as they see their knife-bearing host and her macho son Morgan Spector as potential threats.
“I Don’t Understand You,” for instance, is very much cut from the same cloth as the most demented Danny DeVito films out there, the never-ending nightmare of which evokes memories of ‘Ruthless People’ and ‘The War of the Roses’.
Agreeing to those points, one also has to admit that it is more of a facade. After all, the stranger they intend to never meet is pregnant Amanda Seyfried, who also appears in Crano’s Dog Food short and video calls, and she intends to give them her unborn child. And Francesca looks very happy to welcome a gay couple who embody the happiness her son never experienced. If only Dom and Cole understood her which would explain why they are longing for the words she is saying.
Instead, their fears kick in. This segment of the movie, where cultural misunderstandings lead to chaos, is somewhat unconvincing. The directors understand that gays who have been brought up during the period when such principles were not prevalent and they felt a sense of travel wherever they go like a strain of PTSD.
A quite extreme account of the directors, surrounds the Italy anniversary trip, may be more interesting considering there was no bloodshed. The film presents the couple’s behaviours in a manner that is interpreted to mean that their desire to have children is insatiable. That one is allowed to be not only flawed but also completely mad, is evidence of how far the world has advanced.
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- Genre: Comedy, horror
- Country: United States, Italy
- Director: David Joseph Craig, Brian Crano
- Cast: Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Morgan Spector
