I Don't Understand You

I Don't Understand You seems like it should be right up my alley...and it decidedly was not.

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Scott's Self-Indulgent Movie Podcast · Episode 1096: I Dont Understand You

I have an affection for finding laughs in dark places. It's half the reason I like Ready or Not so much. In that movie death is played for laughs, not because haha death is funny, because of the weapons-grade idiocy that said deaths require (aka a coked-up spoiled rich girl firing off a weapon she doesn't know how to use and killing her favorite housemaid). It's not everyone's sense of humor. But I enjoy it. I'm mentioning all of this because today's movie I Don't Understand You seems like it should be right up my alley...and it decidedly was not.

The Setup

The movie follows Dom and Cole, a married couple whose trying to take their mind off a years-long adoption process with an Italian getaway. But said getaway soon turns into a nightmare as a nice dinner out in the Italian countryside quickly turns terrifying and lethal...

I'll start off by saying that the baseline for this movie is solid. The general idea of American tourists being woefully unprepared to engage with locals, often via the language barrier, and it leading to misadventure is rich ground for comedy. As is a series of misadventures for two lead characters who really want/need things to start going their way. And the direction and acting is solid across the board.

So why doesn't it work? Let's start with our emotional baseline and expand from there.

The background we get is that Dom and Cole have been in the thick of the adoption process for literal years. But now they have a glimmer of hope while on vacation and are understandably, freaking out a bit. About being dads. About traveling to this place in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country. And anything going wrong here would endanger their dream of becoming parents. They are easy to like and easy to empathize with.

And the Italians they encounter are...equally nice. Gracious. Generous. Maybe a bit awkward and can't be understood via the language barrier, but the audience can tell via subtitles that these are good people. So both parties are nice, but one starts to get suspicious of the other because they don't speak the language.

So there's a couple routes I think you could go here, many of which could intersect. All of which have the potential for dark comedy. Let's see if you can guess which route the movie actually took.

Option #1: Make One Party Way Worse

Average people dealing with an accidental death is an effective movie premise...that's infinitely more effective when one of the parties is an asshole. If this is an indie crime movie from the 90s, we'd make our Italian folks people with mob ties or homophobic jerks. If this is more modern movie, we make our couple way worse, which is a fun inversion of the cute gay couple trope a lot of queer-friendly media runs into. Queer people can be assholes too, just like the rest of us.

Regardless of who you pick, you're taking the sting out of any death or misadventure that occurs because either our leads are such dicks that the joke is how awful they are or that even though you shouldn't murder people, these folks kinda deserved it. Or...you could go for option #2.

Option #2: Biting Social Commentary

I Don't Understand You has bunch of opportunities for social commentary that it hints at. You could highlight how experiencing bigotry has made these two men frightened on a day to day basis which results in additional tragedy. You could make this a commentary on ugly Americans, which it kinda is, who don't learn the language and jump to negative conclusions.

I'll get into the angle I think the movie is pushing for, but considering the setup, you've got rich opportunities here. It also means that anything within the film that could be considered "mean-spirited" has a purpose.

Or maybe you take the piss out of the whole thing.

Option #3: Deflate The Premise

A lot of movies deflate all of the death swirling around, or even the presence of a body with two tricks: an upbeat tone or a "this was all a terrible misunderstanding"-style ending. Still a black comedy, but you're aiming for a farce. This is a route taken by great movies like Arsenic and Old Lace and The Trouble with Harry.

I Don't Understand You opted for...the worst of all possible worlds. *Major spoilers ahead* If you want to know my thoughts, it's that this movie would be a lot funnier and more fun if it leaned into its sillier impulses versus its serious ones.

The Option They Chose

If I had to guess, I think the filmmakers were trying to make a movie-long joke on "what would you do for your child?" through a queer lens. These guys want to be dads. They finally have the opportunity. And now they have go through a violent trauma almost as a stand-in for childbirth that they'll have to work together to survive and be the dads they've always wanted to be.

So what's the problem? The tone is off. Our would-be dads are misreading the situation because they don't understand the language, so we're meant to understand via their perspective due to the lighting, shot selection and their reactions that they are terrified.

All of which is completely undercut by the subtitles and what's actually going on.

Because not only are the folks our queer couple think are monsters not monsters, they're actually incredibly supportive of these two and keep laying out new heartbreaking pieces of information before our couple does something horrible to them. See how the woman serving them food had given up on it after her son died and is now finding reason to live again and one of them actually looks an awful lot like their son that they wish had lived long enough to get married and have a family of his own.

It feels, cruel. Not even darkly funny. Just a twist of the knife using your empathy against you.

It feels like the bit at the beginning of Robin Hood: Men in Tights when Robin hears all about how his entire family is dead, but done in a dragged out way to make the audience feel as bad as possible.

As much as I don't go for the "let's rewrite this movie" idea all the time, it's so easy to see small changes that could make a huge difference. Like say...removing the subtitles entirely. Then it's up to us to determine what is or isn't a threat and it's easier to understand our protagonists' perspective. It also forces the audience to ask, "am I any better?" or "would I behave any better?"

The most frustrating thing about this movie is that there are moments that work. Jokes that hit. Great performances. It looks great. Tense setups and payoffs. But as a film, it's an incredibly frustrating experience. Because they had a collection of intriguing options and decided on arguably the worst of all possible worlds.