I’m Not Scared (Io non ho paura) in Berlin

I’m Not Scared: Drama-thriller. Starring Giuseppe Cristiano. Directed by Gabriele Salvatores. Written by Niccolo Ammaniti and Francesca Marciano, from Ammaniti’s
novel.(R. In Italian with English subtitles. 101 minutes.)

By David Hudson

I’m Not Scared I’m Not Scared (Io non ho paura) might sound like the title of
a new horror flick, but while there are several pretty intense moments and one
in particular that literally had the audience jolt back in their seats, it isn’t.
Could have been, though, and the original novel by the film’s screenwriter, Niccolò Ammaniti,
was conceived as a thriller. But director Gabriele Salvatores got to talking
with Ammaniti and they decided to de-thrill the story a bit for the film.

We open with vast, sweeping fields of bright wheat set against a chalky gray-blue
sky. Children run through the fields, leaving paths in the swaying stalks. The
camera is at their hips, then swerves off alone, then back. There’s a race on,
but a chamber orchestra is doing variations on Pachelbel’s Canon, imploring us
to just look at how beautiful it all is. And it is. This is not a bad way at
all to begin a long day of movie-viewing at 9 in the morning. What the unsuspecting
viewer doesn’t know yet, though, is that we are going to be seeing quite a bit
of these fields of wheat and hearing a whole lot from that orchestra. Great swaths
of wheat and music will return again and again and they won’t be doing much to
push the narrative along.

That said, this is a fine coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence film. Michele (Giuseppe Bocchino) is a boy of ten who looks after his younger sister when the half a dozen or so children of a tiny village in southern Italy get together for their races and games. This particular race has taken them to an old abandoned house, and it’s there that Michele, alone, discovers a deep hole in the ground covered with a sheet of corregated tin. Rolling back the metal cover, Michele sees a human foot way down there in the dark mud, poking out from a blanket. Has he just discovered a corpse? He tosses a rock down but misses the foot. It doesn’t move. He lowers the cover again, finds another rock, raises the cover - and the foot is gone.

Someone is down there, chained, all but naked and barely alive. It’s a secret Michele keeps all to himself, or so he thinks, until he learns to his even deeper horror that the whole village, except for the children, already knows about it.

Some of the best scenes in I’m Not Scared poke around a bit in the dynamics of Michele’s family. His father (Dino Abbrescia) has a job in a larger town somewhere. We don’t know what that job is, where that town is, and in fact, we don’t really know when or exactly where this story is taking place. It could be the present; it could be the 1970s. That’s part of the beauty of the set-up. We’re in some timeless, southern Italian summer, but unfortunately, as Michele learns, this village is not the idyll of all those wheat and music shots. His mother, wonderfully played by the Spanish-Italian actress Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, makes him promise that as soon as he’s old enough, he must go somewhere else, somewhere very far away.

Sánchez-Gijón, by the way, got the biggest round of applause at the press conference when she stopped everything to issue a big "thank you" to Germany for its steadfast stance against the approaching war on Iraq. She lambasted Spanish and Italian prime ministers José Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi for throwing their support behind the US-led war despite the fact that the vast majority of their own citizens oppose it.

For his part, little Giuseppe Bocchino talked about how much he enjoyed acting in his first film and how much he hopes he’ll get another shot at another role some day. Despite my hunch that I’m Not Scared, an admirable work, is probably not going to pick up any major awards at the Berlinale, I’ve got another hunch that we will indeed be seeing him again. I certainly hope so.

greencine

02.05.2004
Collective Bellaciao