A Ukrainian nanny takes charge
Domestic Import - a great oxymoron, almost as great as "jumbo shrimp" - is the slapschtick tale of Sophia, a take-charge Ukrainian nanny who annexes the home and the lives of the McMillans, expectant Philadelphia lawyers.The sunny script from rookie screenwriter Andrea Malamut, and reportedly based on her own experience of helping the help, is a broad, sitcommy affair with performances better scaled to the small screen than the large.
Domestic Import - a great oxymoron, almost as great as "jumbo shrimp" - is the slapschtick tale of Sophia, a take-charge Ukrainian nanny who annexes the home and the lives of the McMillans, expectant Philadelphia lawyers.
The sunny script from rookie screenwriter Andrea Malamut, and reportedly based on her own experience of helping the help, is a broad, sitcommy affair with performances better scaled to the small screen than the large.
Sophia Petrenko (Alla Korot) arrives from Kiev in an ensemble of sequins, spandex and dog collar that, to Mr. McMillan, suggests "the homecoming queen of S&M High." Chernobyl at the disco is more like it.
So grateful are the McMillans for Sophia's organizational skills that they do not immediately note that she is a human matrushka, one of those nested Russian dolls concealing smaller ones inside. Only here, the smaller dolls are members of her family.
Sophia, whose clan back in Ukraine is larger even than her American dream, plays the McMillans like a balalaika, persuading them to take in first her daughter, then her mother.
Directed by TV vet Kevin Connor in what charitably can be called a workmanlike fashion, the film gets more laughs from Sophia's increasingly outrageous outfits than from liberal anxiety about employing domestics.
"You don't clean the house to interview the housekeeper," insists neatnik David McMillan (Larry Dorf) to his less-than-tidy spouse, Marsha (Cynthia Preston). Maybe David doesn't clean. But Marsha's bleeding-heart belief that her house is a democracy makes the McMillans comic butts of the refugee from the former totalitarian state.
Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/carrierickey.
Domestic Import ** 1/2
Produced by Andrea Malamut and Tony DiDio, directed by Kevin Connor, written by Andrea Malamut. With Cynthia Preston, Larry Dorf, Alla Korot, Mindy Sterling and Howard Hesseman.
Running time: 1 hour, 40 mins.
Parent's guide: PG-13 (brief profanity, sexual references)
Showing at: selected theaters