La Gracia and I'm barely there with Italian

On the way back from Germany, I watched La Grazia all the way through, then watched certain scenes again. It was in Italian with English subtitles, but I tried to figure out what they were saying in Italian with not much success, of course.

At this point, my Italian is still elementary, and I'm still taking a novice-level class at ItalCultura. To augment the Dieci book that we use in class, I recently started asking AI to create a short story in simple past tense, then add multiple choice comprehension questions at the end. It is very fun to do this! I have done three stories so far, and each one is about visiting a different city in Italy. I don't plan on going to Italy next year, but I will eventually, and I want to be ready to speak it, at least enough to travel with.

I spoke German in Germany, but since I went to Italian restaurants (which were all good), I tried to speak a bit of Italian. One place in Weimar had mostly (or all?) Italian speakers working there, so I ordered in Italian 😀 The guy spoke whatever I spoke to him, so I mixed it up between Italian and German when I asked him questions or made some simple statements. This is why I like to go to places where English is not the default.

But back to La Grazia: the film is visually stunning, and is more of an art film than a plot-driven or conclusive film. The writing seems vague with some thematic exclamations thrown in. I'm not going to get more into detail because it is very difficult to create a visual work of art such as this, and I don't want to put my opinions out there. But I found a review which has a couple of interesting quotes: "acquire a taste for the strange flavour of his work, where the studied weirdness masks the actual weirdness beneath" and "throw realism out the window on an emotional level, substituting an eccentric form of sentimentality that relies on never letting us know how far he’s kidding." Even those words are opaque.