I'm Not Scared - very special

[Howard Schumann]

I'M NOT SCARED (Io non ho paura)

Directed by Gabriele Salvatores (2003)

I have been critical of films that sidestep issues of conscience for broader appeal, so when a film comes along that tackles the issue head on, it is important to take notice. Set in Southern Italy in 1978, I'm Not Scared by Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) is about a child who discovers a small lad hidden in a cavernous hole near an abandoned farmhouse and acts with courage and compassion to "do the right thing". The film has aspects of a standard commercial product with lush music and pseudo-lyrical slow motion shots but it also embodies an artistic sensibility that expressively captures the world of a child in its wonder, innocence, and beauty. Similar to the 1996 film La Promesse by the Dardenne Brothers, it is a film about a young boy's awakening of conscience.

Ten-year old Michele, exquisitely performed by first-time actor Giuseppe Cristiano, is outgoing, intelligent, and strong-willed and there is a great deal of warmth and knowing in his face that makes us instinctively care about him. Michele and his friends play in the vast golden wheat fields during summer and all seems idyllic. When Michele looks for a pair of glasses lost by his sister Maria (Giulia Matturo), however, he makes an unexpected discovery. Beneath a straw-covered plank in the ground he finds Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), a scared, dirty, and almost blind boy of his own age. The child, chained to a stake and barely alive, is subject to hallucinations and believes that he is dead and that Michele is his guardian angel. We don't know if the boy is a "wild child" or the victim of an unspeakable crime. Instead of reporting his finding to his overburdened mother (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), or his moody working class father (Dino Abbrescia), he keeps the secret to himself, bringing bread and water to the starving boy and the two develop a mystical bond of friendship.

When Michele finds out the shocking reason that Filippo is in the cave, he discovers the strength within himself to stand up for what he thinks is right even though it leaves him open to potentially damaging consequences. I'm Not Scared does not idealize children and paint all adults as evil. The children can be ruthless in cruelly teasing the weakest members of their group and in selling out to the wrongdoers for trifles, for example, just to sit at the wheel of a car. The adults commit a heinous crime out of the desperation of poverty or for unstated political reasons but their love for their own children is clear. Based on a novel by Niccoló Amminiti, I'm Not Scared is part suspense drama and part coming-of-age story but cannot be neatly categorized. It is has a strange otherworldly and mythical quality to it, like a cinematic dream and the result is not vacuously uplifting but powerfully moving. In discovering the cave where Filippo is hidden, Michele truly discovers a cave "filled with gems and gold".

GRADE: B+

[Chris Knipp]

I liked this movie too and found what you have to say interesting and well written as usual. I like your observation that Filippo at first could be a “Wild Child” and wish I’d thought of that. I like your consistently moral focus. I somewhat downplayed the aspect of Michele's moral awakening in my review, which I will post below, focusing more on his initial period of confusion and lack of awareness of any wrongdoing. Both aspects are present. You’re right to allude to one of several instances where there’s a sellout, but others have pointed out that Michele intercedes for the girl at first to protect her from shame in the game, so it's not so much a question perhaps of his developing a moral sense as of his simply not knowing what the adults are doing or what's happening down in that hole; once he knows, he also knows what to do.

I like your final observation because it alludes to the important symbolic aspect of the movie: ‘In discovering the cave where Filippo is hidden, Michele truly discovers a cave "filled with gems and gold"’ . I have to quibble with your earlier remark that the movie is “partly a standard commercial product with a predictable plot.” Even qualified by “partly” I think “standard commercial product” is misleading because “I’m Not Afraid” is an art film despite its softness and niche appeal. I don't see that the plot is predictable; there is a sense of discovery. Likewise to say of the music that it’s “sentimental,” referring to the beautiful string quartet stuff, is misleading. I'm bothered by the string music too. It's obtrusive and for my taste a bit too arty, but it's not conventionally sentimental but rather -- again -- is more art film material. I agree that Giuseppe Cristiano is fine and appealing but he’s not a first-time actor, though Mattia de Pierro apparently is, from the IMDb listing.

I don't like to rate every movie I see and I can't help thinking that a "beta plus" is the kiss of death. If it's no better than that, it won't make it to the final cut. But for me it's possible that at year's end, it will. I do a lot of mental sifting through the course of a year's viewing. How would you rate this movie overall among the year’s best? Or would you, like me, have to reserve judgment till more entries are in?

[Chris Knipp]

Gabriele Salvatores: Io non ho paura (2003)

Three stories in one

Children may keep secrets to compete with the world of adults which for them is a secret, even when adults aren’t trying to hide from the children what they do. In I'm Not Scared (Io non ho paura) the adults are hiding what they do, and doing very bad things. A boy uncovers their dark secret, but it’s a mystery to him, so he interprets it for himself through what it tells him, and through the fables, fairytales, and comic books his head is full of. He lives in the country, in the south of Italy, where there are a couple of cars and a TV and the local convenience store comes on wheels once in a while. His house is separated from the mystery by hills and fields of high grass, and across and over a hill out of sight lies the sea. The world of 10-year-old Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is filled with light. His arms and legs are strong and brown from riding his bike everywhere in the summer sun. The secret he discovers is dark and blind and pale, a creature that at first terrifies him and then evokes his pity.

I’m Not Afraid is a movie that works only if you consent to see the world through the eyes of Michele but also accept that Gabriele Salvatores, the director, who’s adapting a novel, isn’t telling us all that’s going on in Michele’s mind either. This is a world of the purely physical that conceals and evokes a spiritual and moral (and immoral) world. Michele doesn’t understand at first what his father is involved in, but lives in his own world of secrets, bargains, and revelations that only slowly comes to terms with what the adults are doing and tries to trump them. (A child has the advantage of being regarded as unimportant and therefore is unseen.) This aspect of the movie is reminiscent of René Clément’s Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits, 1952), a story of children creating their own strange rituals hidden away from adults in a world of war filled with inexplicable mystery and terror. Paura doesn’t quite have the resonance of Clément’s film, perhaps primarily because it hasn’t got the emotional force of a great war behind it; but it does have the mystery and the horror.

The real horror here is the greed of petty gangsters. Michele’s truck driver father (who’s rarely around) and a couple of shady pals have kidnapped a boy for ransom. The facts appear on the TV news that everybody watches at Michele’s house and Michele pieces together a story from seeing a mother plead for mercy for her timid son and time to get together the money, and from hearing the adults’ quarrels at night in his house. When police helicopters come and the adults draw straws he realizes their scheme has failed and they are going to kill the boy and hide his body to escape punishment and he must try to help the boy escape.

But the horror is also the little body in the dark hole: at first the boy – shaggy-haired, covered with mud, draped in a dark cloth, terrified himself and crazed from the isolation and imprisonment -- seems like a strange monster that terrifies Michele and us. With great economy of means, I’m Not Afraid is three stories in one: a horror story, a crime story, and a story of a boy’s glimmerings of adulthood. Michele isn’t adult enough to think of calling the police (even if he could in this rural place); the boy down in the hole, who he learns from the “Telegiornale” TV news is called Filippo, is his secret and his special pet, whom he tries to feed and takes out for a walk in the high grass (Filippo is blinded by the light and staggers like a mole) and then puts back in the hole.

The risk Salvatores takes is to absorb the atmosphere of Michele’s country, summer world. Only the sometimes obtrusive arty string quartet music distracts us from the slow rhythms of summer days, games with friends, the bespectacled little sister, bike rides over the gentle hills and romps in the tall grass – which, symbolically, is mowed down at the end when the play is over and Michele has been disabused of his fantasies. But not quite: he chants phrases from books to steel himself when he goes by night the last time to rescue Filippo from his new imprisonment near a pigsty. (With gruesome rustic practicality the failed gangsters plan to feed Filippo’s corpse to the pigs.)

Salvatores, the director, doesn’t quite leave the child’s world behind himself, either: his ending is a kind of mythical wish fulfillment, an image of the kidnapped boy being saved, Michele surviving a gunshot wound, Filippo reaching out his hand to his “Guardian Angel” (as he has called him) in a flood of light. On one level the movie is a scandalous story from the Italian police blotter. But on another it’s a fable of mysterious import. Perhaps Filippo, who's the same age and at the same level in school, is Michele’s dark secret underside, his imagination and his child’s freedom, which the adults put in chains and try to destroy. The final music is a little too pretty and arty and the ending is a little too quick and easy a resolution (more so, I gather, than the book’s), but Salvatores’ film is a memorable evocation of childhood, brilliantly acted by the children, especially the gifted Cristiano -- with links to other striking tales of a child’s discovery of adult evil like Carol Reed’s 1948 The Fallen Idol. It’s an astonishingly peaceful and beautiful film that manages to remain selfconsicously simple, almost opaque, without descending into cliché or self indulgence at any point. Salvatores is an Italian director of distinction (his 1992 Mediterraneo won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film) whose work we deserve to see more of.

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
I have to quibble with your earlier remark that the movie is “partly a standard commercial product with a predictable plot.” Even qualified by “partly” I think “standard commercial product” is misleading because “I’m Not Afraid” is an art film despite its softness and niche appeal. I don't see that the plot is predictable; there is a sense of discovery. Likewise to say of the music that it’s “sentimental,” referring to the beautiful string quartet stuff, is misleading. I'm bothered by the string music too. It's obtrusive and for my taste a bit too arty, but it's not conventionally sentimental but rather -- again -- is more art film material.

I liked this film enough to see it twice in the theater the same week so perhaps you are right, that I judged it a bit too harshly. I may have anticipated criticism about its being too clichéd and went too far to avoid it. I think it is a special film as I also point out and the "mainstream" aspects did not get in the way for me. I might edit it a bit before it gets to Cinescene.

I don't like to rate every movie I see and I can't help thinking that a "beta plus" is the kiss of death. If it's no better than that, it won't make it to the final cut. But for me it's possible that at year's end, it will. I do a lot of mental sifting through the course of a year's viewing. How would you rate this movie overall among the year’s best? Or would you, like me, have to reserve judgment till more entries are in?

So far the two best films I've seen this year are BROKEN WINGS, and I'M NOT SCARED.

[Howard Schumann]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chris Knipp
[B]Gabriele Salvatores: Io non ho paura (2003)

Your review is terrific, much better than mine. Why don't you also submit it to Cinescene and let the judge decide?

[Chris Knipp]

Well, that's kind of you, I don't know if it's better than yours but I already did submit it along with a review of Nanni Moretti's The Boy's Room (La stanza del figlio) from two years ago, which I admire. I'd like to have a discussion of contemporary Italian movies, but I can't say that I've seen that many of them and I don't know that there are that many to see--distributed in the US, I mean. I've seen a few in a UC Berkeley Italian students series (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~iisa/movies.html), which permitted me to view Gabriele Muccino's two other movies besides The Last Kiss -- Come te nessuno mai (But Forever in My Mind) and Ricordati di me (Remember me). The six-hour La meglio gioventù was interesting, but I missed others, including Salvatores' 1992 Puerto Escondido, and I don't think that's been seen here. Salvatores has made about a dozen movies and as far as I know only two have been distributed in the US, yet he's a highly regarded director in Italy. He's also directed a lot of plays (http://www.moviement.it/scheda.phtml?art=68). Those who attend film festivals diligently like Oscar may have seen more.

[Johann]

The Pacific Cinematheque is showing a series entitled "Piemonte"-all Italian films. I'll at least get to see Cabiria, a 3-hour silent classic. Italy is a country rich in many things, cinema being but one...

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp
I'd like to have a discussion of contemporary Italian movies, but I can't say that I've seen that many of them and I don't know that there are that many to see--distributed in the US, I mean. I've seen a few in a UC Berkeley Italian students series (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~iisa/movies.html), which permitted me to view Gabriele Muccino's two other movies besides The Last Kiss -- Come te nessuno mai (But Forever in My Mind) and Ricordati di me (Remember me). The six-hour La meglio gioventù was interesting, but I missed others, including Salvatores' 1992 Puerto Escondido, and I don't think that's been seen here. Salvatores has made about a dozen movies and as far as I know only two have been distributed in the US, yet he's a highly regarded director in Italy. He's also directed a lot of plays ([url].

Some of my favorite films of the last decade have been by Gianni Amelio, especially Lamerica, Stolen Children, and The Way We Laughed. Have you seen any of these?

[Howard Schumann]

Originally posted by Johann
The Pacific Cinematheque is showing a series entitled "Piemonte"-all Italian films. I'll at least get to see Cabiria, a 3-hour silent classic. Italy is a country rich in many things, cinema being but one...

That's in Calgary, I presume. What else are they showing?

[Johann]

No, that's in Vancouver- I'll be going down for the Cocteau retro and to see Cabiria in about 2 weeks (it's only a ten-hour drive).

[Chris Knipp]

Originally posted by Howard Schumann:

Some of my favorite films of the last decade have been by Gianni Amelio, especially Lamerica, Stolen Children, and The Way We Laughed. Have you seen any of these?

No, I haven't seen any of those, though I've heard the first two mentioned, certainly. I'll see if I can find them. I'll have to look them up. A fan on the Italian site FilmUp says Stolen Children is the best Italian film since the early Eighties and that nobody knows better than he does how to show the hardships the young are forced to undergo; that Stolen Children is to our period what Truffaut's 400 Blows was to the Sixties.

Michael Atkinson completely trashed I'm Not Scared in the Village Voice, by the way. They do that sometimes. He's on a tear. I'm not exactly sure why he so loathes this movie, when he adores Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter. . .and Spring. Read and weep:

Let's take this moment to recognize an official movie genre, the Miramaxical, more or less defined as heavy-handed imports that could just as easily have been made by the blandest hacks in Burbank, but which instead cost one-hundredth as much to buy and peddle. It's a cornered market in quasi-American knockoffs, the Wal-Mart-ization of the foreign-film market, with a reliable, bachelor-degree boomer audience for whom domestic pop culture has just gotten too youthful and hyperactive, and who may consider seeing a "literary" Italian suspense thriller like I'm Not Scared long before they'd ever deign to sit through the latest, not dissimilar Sony boo machine in a multiplex theater packed with uncontrollable teenagers. Miramaxicals predate Harvey and Bob, of course, as Beat the Clock presaged Fear Factor. But the aberration has become the cultural rule.

-- Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0414/atkinson.php

[chelsea jubis]

Written by oscar jubis.

Italy was most important as a nation producing great cinema during a 30-35 year span beginning right after WWII (Open City, Paisan, Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine). There were few Italian movies of high pedigree released in the past 20 years; especially if we exclude Bertolucci's international productions (Tha Last Emperor is one of my favorite epics).
My favorite during this recent time is Amelio's Lamerica. I do understand Italians prefering Amelio's Stolen Children, given how it navigates the important issue of regional aspersions within Italy, and the presence of hard-but-endearing child characters. Amelio's Open Doors and The Way We Laughed are only a notch below, where I'd also include the crowd pleasing Giusseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso, The Star Maker, Legend of 1900).
I really admire Antonioni's Beyond The Clouds, completed with assistance from Wim Wenders in 1995. Two excellent movies with large "ensemble" cast are Scola's The Family and Pupi Avati's Story of Boys and Girls. Avati's films are all set in the verdant Emilia-Romagna region and often pack a wallop. My favorite, a film festival discovery I may never see again, is called Graduation Party. I also like two from Nanni Moretti: Caro Diario and The Son's Room.

[Chris Knipp]

This is another vote in favor of Amelio and I'll certainly have to seek him out.

By Pupi Avati I guess I've only seen "Il cuore altrove" (The Heart Elsewhere), an interesting, peculiar, if for me somewhat underwhelming effort shown recently in the UC Berkeley Italian students series I mentioned.

Of course I'd agree with you from what little I know that the Italians were great (very great) filmmakers during the period you mention and have seen a decline in the past couple of decades. But because of that decline or for whatever reason we have simply not seen much of their (perhaps relatively more limited) recent production. I strongly suspect that there's a lot of interesting stuff that just hasn't gotten here, because the distribution flow has dropped off due to a lack of publicity for Italian filmmakers compared to the days of Rossellini, De Sica, Viconti, Antonioni, et al., on whom many of the elders among us cut our foreign movie teeth. Pupi Avati for instance has made and written over thirty films. Can only one or two be worth watching? Accordingly I'd like to catch Graduation Party (Festa di laurea). Once again my hat's off to you for ferreting out and acquainting yourself with such a wide spectrum of cinematic fare. I still don't know how you or Johann do it, and with your busy life of work, family, running, etc. Florida would make some people sluggish. It seems to pep you up.

[chelsea jubis]

Originally posted by Chris Knipp I strongly suspect that there's a lot of interesting stuff that just hasn't gotten here, because the distribution flow has dropped off due to a lack of publicity for Italian filmmakers.

There are two films I pin my hopes on; both cleaned up at the last two Italian Academy Awards (David di Donatello Awards):
La Finestra di Fronte to be distributed by Sony.
The Best of Youth, a 6 hr long story of a family during a 40-year span. Miramax bought distribution rights for N. America. Will Harvey actually release it?

On the other hand, Italian cinema is moribund. I see everything I can at fests and on import dvd, I read festival journals, I visit European film websites. I see little coming out of Italy to get excited about. Solid, entertaining films (recently:Malena, Respiro, Embalmer, etc.) but nothing that compares to the best of world cinema or the great Italian films of '45 to '79.

[Chris Knipp]

As I said above, I just saw The Best of Youth in the UC Berkeley Italian Students series. I said it was interesting. I’ve posted a review of it on IMDb http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346336/usercomments-12 Maybe you would like to check the UCB series and see if there are others you've seen and can comment on for us: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~iisa/movies.html.

I really didn't like Malena or Respiro -- very soft, very weak. Embalmer was very offbeat and had a quirky appeal; certainly not overwhelming, though.

Maybe when I said I thought there was a lot of interesting stuff we don't get to see it was just wishful thinking. "Moribund" is a depressingly strong word, though.

Surely a major issue is that Italian culture is overwhelmed by American. More then half their bestsellers, last I looked, are translations of American books. Their TV is weak and heavily American-influenced. I contrast this with the French, who made a determined effort after World War II to resist American cultural dominance. They care about their culture and defend it vigorously; the Italians cave in.

Another significant factor is "doppiaggio," dubbing: the Italians idiotically pride themselves on having the best dubbers in the world, as if that were to be admired. It did play a positive role during the Neorealist era by permitting extensive use of non-actors. Happily they don't dub Italian movies any more, since it made the dialogue sound unnatural, but since they show all American movies dubbed (except for a few art houses), that means the mainstream Italian audience can be fed nothing but American stuff and they can get Troy right away with Brad yakking in Italian.

The fact still remains that not everything gets to festivals and we may be missing some good things. I like to see precisely what does not appeal to the "international" audience. Globalization of cinema like "World Music" means homogenization and cutsyfying specific cultures and artistic visions.