My Name Is Tanino

2002 Italian film

5 July 2002 (2002-07-05) (Venice Film Festival)

Running time

124 minutesCountriesItaly
CanadaLanguagesItalian, EnglishBox office€1,044,026 (Italy)

My Name Is Tanino is a 2002 comedy film directed by Paolo Virzì. The picaresque plot is about Tanino, an Italian liberal arts student who falls in love with a young American tourist he meets in Sicily and decides to track her down in the United States.^[1]

Plot

Gaetano Mendolìa, nicknamed Tanino, is a native of the fictional Castelluzzo del Golfo, a small seaside resort in the province of Trapani, Sicily. He studies cinematography in Rome and dreams of becoming a movie director.

He meets Sally, an American girl vacationing in Italy, with whom he has a brief romance. At the end of her vacation, Sally returns to the fictional Seaport, Rhode Island but forgets her camera in Italy. Tanino decides to travel to the US with the pretext of returning Sally's camera to her but also to avoid Italian military service. He leaves at night without telling anyone.

After arriving in America, Tanino has a series of adventures with the somewhat shady Li Causi family, Italian-Americans living in the US. Eventually he leaves them and finally meets up with Sally and her "perfect" White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, confounding them with his antics.

Later, Tanino escapes the clutches of the FBI by riding on the roof of a train and arrives in New York City where he meets his idol, director Seymour Chinawsky. However Chinawsky is reduced to poverty and dies soon after promising to make a film with Tanino.

Despite Tanino's many misadventures, he always comes out on top because of his ingenuity.