A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Cinema: PINOBERTELLI - I Captain (2023) by Matteo Garrone (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

In the full-blown imbecility of Italian cinema, and There's Still 
Tomorrow by Paola Cortellesi, is the apogee of the commercial 
provincialism in which it is drowned... sometimes authors of a certain 
authorial caliber appear - in addition to the usual strays of 
resistance, of course cultural such as Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant 
Gianikian, Paolo Benvenuti, Pietro Marcello, Alice Rohrwacher, just to 
name a few -... among the few films that truly have the character of 
disillusionment we can include works such as The Mouth of the Wolf 
(2010) or The scarlatte sails (2022) by Pietro Marcello, Lazzaro Felice 
(2018) by Alice Rohrwacher, The Wind Makes His Tour (2005) by Giorgio 
Diritti, Kidnapped (2023) by Marco Bellocchio or I Captain by Matteo 
Garrone. Here cinema shows that freedom is the right to difference and 
every type of institutional/religious supremacy contains the germ of 
every form of tyranny.

It must be said... whether prizes or an Oscar are awarded to The Captain 
is of little or no interest to us...

Garrone's film is a universal fairy tale... it doesn't just talk about 
emigration but above all about social injustice and the freedom to dream 
of a different world, less ferocious, more human, perhaps. Two 
Senegalese boys, Seydou and Moussa... leave the poverty of Dakar and 
undertake the journey of desperation to reach Italy, where Seydou would 
like to become a famous rapper and give autographs to white people. They 
worked hard and pooled the money to cross the deserts of Mali, Niger and 
reach Libya... naturally, on the way they were deceived and swindled by 
human traffickers, then arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Libyan 
mafia... Garrone constructs the moments of torture with skilled figural 
dexterity... he leads the viewer into a labyrinth of extreme situations 
(piles of corpses) without ever falling into complacency or vulgarity.

In the prison, intermediaries of the rich Libyans buy the men to make 
them work as slaves... Seydou, aided by a prisoner who is a bricklayer, 
is bought to work as a laborer in a villa in the desert... they build a 
fountain which the master likes very much... he is given the freedom and 
the money to go to Tripoli. In the Libyan capital Seydou works in 
construction and a little adventurously (perhaps too much) finds Moussa, 
wounded in the leg. In the hospital they don't accept illegal immigrants 
and the boys decide to resume their journey to Italy. They don't have 
enough money to cross the Mediterranean... the smugglers reach an 
agreement with Seydou... they give the boy a few instructions and 
entrust him with a fishing boat full of refugees which he has to drive 
to the Italian coast... they also give him the telephone number of the 
non-governmental organizations to warn them about the arrival of the 
desperate. Seydou manages to bring the "ship of the sea" to Sicily and 
to the soldiers who rescue them, he shouts: "I am captain", I am 
captain, I am captain". The boy has become captain of his own existence.

In Garrone's film there is no sort of rhetoric of emigration that 
affects all film festivals... it is rather the impervious viaticum of 
two boys who dream of success in the country-Italy, where even the first 
imbecile of a party, of a movement or a fan company can happily reside 
in the sewer of parliament. The people only count on election day, we 
know this, but do you really think that the saprophytes of capitalism or 
the cutthroats of state communism would make you vote if the ballot 
paper changed something?

The screenplay of I Captain, written by Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, 
Massimo Ceccherini, Andrea Tagliaferri, expresses a dry, even lyrical 
poetics, and we don't know how much it owes to the stories on migrations 
from the African continent by Kouassi Pli Adama Mamadou, Arnaud Zohin, 
Amara Fofana , Brhane Tareke and Siaka Doumbia, served for 
documentation... and we don't even care... we don't seem to recognize in 
the film, as has been said, even the strands of children's fiction by 
Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson... Garrone's film treatment if 
anything it refers to the visual body of François Truffaut in The 400 
Blows (1959) or The Pocket Years (1976), even more to The Little 
Fugitive (1953) by Raymond Abrashkin (credited as Ray Ashley), Morris 
Engel and the photographer Ruth Orkin ... little literature and a lot of 
cinema, in short... the settings are different, the ethical meanings are 
profoundly the same... a visual writing that is not at all instinctive, 
nor spontaneous... characterized instead in the conduct of the actors in 
a madrigal manner, according to the ingenious lesson of truthfulness 
that surpasses the reality of Jean Renoir. The interpreters are 
themselves and at the same time a mirror-image of all the migratory 
tragedies that escape the impoverishment imposed by the 
economic-political systems.

Garrone shoots the film in sequence, with Steadicam and handheld 
camera... he makes use of the technical expertise of the director of 
photography, Paolo Carnera, who sets the film in an unusual beauty for 
Italian cinema of approximation, not to mention insignificance ... 
together with the operator Matteo Carlesimo, he operates the ALEXA Mini 
LF and ARRI Signature Primes cameras, it seems to me, with great 
aesthetic excellence... the reds, browns, greens, express a color that 
emerges from the fabulous to delve into the drama of the story. Carnera 
says he was influenced by the figurative culture of the great reporters 
- "among all my teacher Ernest Haas, and then by the colors of the 
American photographer Steve McCurry and the composition of the Brazilian 
photographer Salgado", he says -... it seems to us that from his work 
Haas's "magical realism" certainly emerges, but not McCurry's sly 
color... while Salgado's material composition is completely inlaid with 
the director's solid quadratures.

Marco Spoletini's editing creates a complex film score... long shots, 
close-ups, slow camera movements... they connect the story on the faces, 
bodies, gazes of the protagonists... a scriptural elegy of great 
emotional breadth that infuses the entire film the strength of a 
language-metaphor of violated everyday life... an exercise in stylistic 
de-fascination from what runs and intertwines a philosophy of 
hospitality with something that escapes the canons of reality. Andrea 
Farri's music, not at all consolatory or comedic, is inserted into the 
epic-cyclical creativity of the film, to the point of touching the 
chords of secular compassion.

Garrone inserts two surreal visions of notable constructive finesse into 
the film... the one in the desert, when Seydou fails to save the elderly 
woman from death, and the obvious references are to Chagall's immense 
painting, and that of the angel who leads him back to his home ... a 
reference to Pasolini's fairytale, used several times in his cinema in 
the form of poetry.... the simplicity of Laurent Creusot's special 
effects is surprising... he does not rely on too many technical 
mannerisms and the sequences enter and exit the film in a dreamlike 
vision that amazes with their scenic beauty... it is an emotional 
impulse, a metaphysical missive that goes beyond the the agony to settle 
in the hope that no malice can break.

The performers of I Captain, Seydour Sarr, mainly... here in his debut 
in cinema... are engraved in the authenticity of the film... their 
bodies speak, like their desires... they talk about social 
marginalization through sufferings they know closely... they express a 
tragic reality that confiscates fiction and overturns it into the harsh 
truth of their time. On their faces we can read every tear shed by their 
fathers and the historical violence that has strangled every future of 
happiness. In the dogmas of progress, civilization and the mythologies 
of the market empire, more crimes have been committed than those 
described in the Gospels. The civilization of the spectacle feeds on 
tears... intolerance, brutality, expropriation, domination... they have 
confiscated the right to life of the humiliated peoples... and until the 
conquerors pale in front of the ostentation of the freedom of the 
insurgent peoples, the task of man will not be finished.

Amen, and so is he.

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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