Captain, My Captain
Italy’s foremost purveyor of grimy Neapolitan gangster drama pivots to humanitarianism. Who’dathunk?
Io Capitano
Director: Matteo Garrone • Writers: Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Massimo Ceccherini, Andrea Tagliaferri
Starring: Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, Issaka Sawagodo, Khady Sy, Hichem Yacoubi
Italy / Belgium / France • 2hrs 1min
Opens Hong Kong April 18 • IIB
Grade: A
Starting with his breakout The Embalmer in 2002, Italian director Matteo Garrone has made a name for himself playing in the far less “bel” corners of il bel paese. That noir-ish oddity was based on the true story of a taxidermist love triangle (!) gone sour, after which Garrone started dabbling in more traditional crime drama material. Chief among them are the elegantly brutish mafia epic Gomorrah (not the TV series) and Dogman, a sort of revenge thriller rooted in misguided loyalty and economic desperation. Even when re-imagining a kids’ classic in one of the rash of Pinocchio adaptations from a few years back, Garrone leans into a kind of grit that focuses on the poverty of rural Italy. Buddy has a brand.
All that said it’s kind of a surprise – but kind of not – that Garrone’s turned his attention to Europe’s migrant crisis and the all-too-frequent portraits of hopeless and hopeful immigrants, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, as dangerous monsters that will be the ruin of Europe (wow, that’s a familiar tune these days). Io Capitano could be seen as the more narratively propulsive companion to Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 Golden Bear winner Fire at Sea, the documentary about the Italian Coast Guard constantly plucking boats fleeing north Africa out of the sea around the tiny island of Lampedusa. Io Capitano , which picked up 12 awards at Venice, including the Silver Lion for directing, spins an intimate but positively Homeric story about the kind of people who might be on these boats, and in doing so forces us all to admit how quickly we’re willing to forget these people’s humanity. We’re not them by luck.
The Sahara is beautiful, but…
Garrone and his trio of co-writers based Io Capitano on actual emigration stories they collected from actual African emigrants that survived the trek across the Mediterranean. To most of us the Med is a calm sea of clear blue water and a warm, welcoming spot for relaxing. But the little stretch between Libya and Lampedusa killed 1,600 people in the first quarter of 2015, making it the deadliest migrant route in the world. Take that, Eurostar rail and Texas-Mexico border! The end result of the writers’ work is an odyssey (that pun is intended) about teenaged cousins Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) secretly conspiring to smuggle themselves out of Senegal and into Italy. The football-mad boys – and these are indeed boys – see Europe as an almost mythic land of opportunity and freedom, where there’s a good life for everyone (hahahahahahaha). Seydou’s mother (Khady Sy) knows something’s up and vows she’ll murder Seydou herself is he tries to go, but that does little to dissuade them. After making a deal with what’s essentially a snakehead, they find themselves crossing Mali and Niger, most of it Sahara, and Libya, dealing in fake passports, bribes, shake-downs, jail, torture and modern slavery. It’s very possible Garrone & Co. amalgamated many experiences into Seydou’s single journey; it doesn’t mean this stuff doesn’t happen. Or that we should collectively accept the exploitation of disadvantaged people – especially when so much of that disadvantage is the result of centuries of a different type of exploitation.
Not everything is dire. Seydou meets Martin (Issaka Sawagodo, Night of the Kings), a fellow Senegalese carpenter who helps him get out of a Libyan jail and back on the road to the promised land. And indeed, Seydou makes it to Italy, but the film’s closing frames suggest more of a reset than a new beginning.
In many way, Io Capitano trades in some of the same human trafficking and scam artistry issues as No More Bets – it just does it with more storytelling skill and less moral hyperbole. Some might argue it’s misguided, but Garrone mixes a little magical realism into his cocktail of conventional thriller tropes and realist drama to come up with a singular, epic road trip that takes Italy, the EU and the wealthiest among us to task for shirking our responsibilities. That third act boat ride is as white-knuckle as anything in a Mission:Impossible movie. It helps that he has veteran cinematographer Paolo Carnera (Stefano Sollima’s Suburra) on hand, whose gorgeous widescreen images visualise just now insignificant Seydou and Moussa are, and how fraught their journey is. Seydou’s Saharan flight of fancy following a tragic death is one of the most beautiful moments of the film, and the juxtaposition of beauty on an ugly moment is perfect in its irony.
Now, there is a lot of drama in Io Capitano – literally, “I’m the captain” – but Garrone never lets the humanity of his characters get away from him, even in moments that bring together a lot of strangers. It’s easy to understand a short temper given the circumstances. But it’s Seydou’s story, and watching him go from kid snacking on his favourite street food at a Dakar festival to grown-up guardian shepherding dozens of souls across dangerous waters is heartbreaking. He. Is. A. Child. Newcomer Sarr won the Marcello Mastroianni Award at Venice and he is fantastic: sweet, snotty, anxious, determined, terrified and ultimately hardened. You get him, and you want him to go back to his mother as much as conquer Italy. There’s no judgement here, either; no one’s purely bad. Everyone’s just trying to make the most of the shit hand they’ve been dealt – be it defined by poverty, conflict or persecution. Garrone’s not naïve enough to think Seydou is destined for a happy ending, but if he’s lucky the next time we see someone clambering for better we’ll STFU about immigrants taking “our” jobs. No one walks across the Sahara for that. — DEK