The word "chiara" in Italian literally means "clear." As an adjective, it can be understood as connoting clarity, or the quality of shining the light of truth onto something. Therefore, the title of Italian-American filmmaker Jonas Carpignano's latest feature, A Chiara, can be understood as not only directly referring to its protagonist, a bourgeois Calabrian teenager named Chiara played by newcomer Swamy Rotolo, but also as describing the process of Rotolo's character coming "to light" or "to clarity" over the course of the story.
In the context of Carpignano's body of work, though, this layering of meanings goes a step beyond that. Carrying on the neorealist tradition of post-war Italian cinema, the now 38-year-old writer-director has, for the last decade or so, chosen to explore the evolving socio-economic and racial realities of his father's homeland, in particular the municipality of Gioia Tauro in Calabria. The population of Gioia Tauro only hovers somewhere around 20,000 people. It is infamous in the Italian media due to its history of industrial mismanagement and neglect, which has contributed to its endemic poverty, the corruption in its local governance, and especially its significance as a major port for drug-trafficking engaged in by the 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate. It has also proven to be a juncture of geographical purgatory for the laboring migrants and climate refugees who increasingly make the perilous journey from north Africa to southern Europe. This is the topic that Carpignano explored in his first feature film Mediterranea, which starred Burkinabé actor Koudous Seihon as a human trafficker who travels from Algiers to Libya to Italy in order to financially support his daughter, only to find stable work virtually impossible to come by in a social climate rife with racist hostility and exploitation. Seihon would return in a supporting role for Carpignano's follow-up, A Ciambra (literally, "to Ciambra"), a coming-of-age story starring the young Pio Amato, with a supporting cast of his real-life family, set in the Romani ghettos of the film's title. Hence, from Africa to Europe, from the Mediterranean seaside to rural Ciambra, Carpignano's cinematic exploration now comes "to Clarity", in the ostensive completion of a trilogy that lyrically maps the geographic, ethnic, and economic borders of contemporary Italia; with both Seihon and Amato making featured cameo appearances, to boot.
A Chiara is a coming-of-age story, as well, with Carpignano once again opting to extrapolate a narrative from researching and casting a real-life family. We first meet the Rotolo clan on the evening of the eighteenth birthday of Chiara's older sister Giulia. This naive episode seems to suggest nothing except, in the context of the director's ongoing oeuvre, the hermetic privilege of "native" Calabria. As with his previous films, Carpignano does not shy away from the frank hostility with which even everyday Italians police geographic and ethnic borders, as when Chiara and a couple of her friends harass and bully away a Romani girl who is loitering in "their spot." But by the same token, A Chiara is not a story about a spoiled rich girl who just has to learn some hard facts about the ways of the world. (Don't worry about any dance scenes set in an African refugee camp or a Romeo & Juliet affair between Chiara and a cute Romani boy.) Carpignano invests just as heavily in the non-judgmental portrayal of his more privileged characters, and all of their prejudices, as he has done with the ethnic and economic underclasses portrayed in Mediterranea and A Ciambra. In so doing, he manages to successfully immerse us in the protagonist's very confidence in the juvenile totality of the world she knows. When she is being chastised by her older cousins for being caught vaping, and they are suddenly distracted by the indiscrete arrival of four rather serious, rough-looking gentleman, she can only count herself lucky and hope they don't tell her father Claudio that she is smoking. When she returns to the party only to see her father coming out, looking very serious indeed, we see this not through the veil of foreboding of things to come, but through the eyes of a girl who is still hoping that she's not about to get into trouble. Hence, when the rug is pulled out from under us - when Chiara wakes from a premonitory dream to find her father disappearing in the middle of the night, the family car going up in flames just as she attempts to follow him - we get an understated sense of rupture that is at once emotionally impactful, while also feeling disquietingly organic and smooth in its transition from contentment to chaos.
It is just such a lightness of touch that characterizes the best aspects of Carpignano's writing and direction. As the story unfolds, Chiara is forced by her family's conspiracy of silence to search for her father, gradually uncovering the root of their privilege in their complicity with the 'Ndrangheta drug trade. But A Chiara is not a gangster film. In interviews, Carpignano has described his experience of being dissuaded from making his films, including this one, because of the concern by Gioia Tauro's locals that they would feed into a hyperbolic, violent presentation of the commune that would further stigmatize, rather than promote understanding of, the various peoples who live there. And in as much as A Chiara is the story of a young girl's confrontation with the seedy underbelly of the world she thought she knew, it is also just as much about the uncanny character of Gioia Tauro itself. The members of the Rotolo family go to nice schools, wear nice clothes, drive nice cars, and live in nice big houses. But even within the narrow purview of their day-to-day lives, they are themselves "ghetto-ized" in a decaying corridor of the modern Italian state. Within only a few minutes of travel, Carpignano and cinematographer Tim Curtin's camera first shows the facade of romantic, historical preservation that characterizes the architecture and infrastructure of the "native" Calabrian suburbs, only to betray the sea-side vistas in which vestigial concrete mesas are left to crumble into the sea. What social mechanisms there are can only offer pabulum about renewal, whereas even this daughter of the middle-class finds herself suddenly vagrant, facing down the threat of the state's only solution to the problems of endemic crime and creeping poverty, which turns out to be tearing her family apart. The sense of "clarity" at which his trilogy arrives isn't necessarily devoid of romanticism, but it nonetheless offers a mostly compelling fulfillment and critique of the ways in which increasingly reactive and entrenched European societies fail their children at all strata of class and racial hierarchy, with "borders" themselves (whether between suburbs and urban ghettos, or between the global north and south) offering only grand illusions of security and progress.
I say "mostly" compelling, because there is an extent to which Carpignano's lightness of touch also fails him in his rendering of A Chiara, at least as far as sustaining the immersive, emotional credibility that he brings to the film's opening. The weaknesses of his vision were certainly foreshadowed in Mediterranea and A Ciambra. In the latter film, especially, one got a distinct sense of how the study of Pio Amato's character suffered from Carpignano's lack of both imagination and consistency even when it came to a rather straightforward narrative, with Pio presented as being at once being pathologically afraid of going on elevators and trains because they move too fast, only to impulsively lead Italian police on a car chase when it was convenient (and thrilling) to the plot. Now, with Seihon and the Amato family as windows into a larger support narrative, A Chiara comes off on its own as especially listless and, even for all its frankness, overly sentimental. Falling somewhere between Meadow Soprano and Nancy Drew, Chiara is a character whose impulses and adventures gradually strain credulity beyond repair. There is just too much defiant and resourceful investigation and going into places unknown, and just not enough of what most teenagers in her class position would do in response to sudden trauma, which is to just go through the motions, dreadfully avoiding just the sort of horrible "clarity" into which Chiara dives headlong.
There is a moment in the movie where one of her cousins talks to her about the significance of the painter Raphael in terms of portraying the nobility of contemporary Italy as they actually were, not as the portrait artist might think they wanted to be portrayed. This at once refers back to the film's themes of clarity, the denouement of Carpignano's Calabrian trilogy resting on a contemporary representation of the historical comorbidity between the Italian upper-classes and criminal corruption. But one also can't help but hear in this line a confidence trick at the behest of the apparent social and cultural authenticity of the film itself. There's no getting around the clearly fantastic and embellished quality of the kind of coming-of-age story that Carpignano chooses to tell. He too quickly eschews the anthropological description of everyday life in favor of an ersatz mystery and adventure that takes too much for granted. Conflating an ethics of de-stigmatization with "clarity," the results are an uneven and formulaic story that fails to adequately exploit the unpredictability and ironies of day-to-day life in extreme circumstance.
Comments
Post a Comment