Before Jonas Carpignano makes a movie, first, he must find it. His last two features integrated themselves into the terrain of a distinctly modern Italy and imposed a loose narrative on the real-world subcultures based there, with 2015’s “Mediterranea” joining a group of African refugees and 2017’s “A Ciambra” extending that same observant attention to a Romani enclave settled in Calabria. He collaborates with nonprofessional actors and eschews strict scripting, advising them on the particulars of their character and allowing them to be guided by the authentic circumstances and dynamics setting the scene. More than simply using this reality, he’s allegiant to it, introducing strokes of fiction only to portray these insular communities with more faithful dramatic accuracy. If the rising tide of Chloé Zhao lifts all boats, his technique may now meet with gamer Stateside audiences once his latest Cannes sidebar selection makes it to theaters.
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The new “A Chiara” completes an informal trilogy, applying these same methods to the other significant cultural faction in the town of Gioia Tauro. The shipping port’s tactical importance attracted the organized crime syndicate known as the ‘Ndrangheta in the mid-20th century, and they’ve since made the small seaside hamlet into a stronghold through which an estimated 80% of all the cocaine in Europe is imported. (The Wikipedia article touts the tidbit that, for a time, the town’s murder-per-capita rate exceeded that of New York City.) Carpignano directs his focus to the local gangster underworld while rejecting the gangster genre, concentrating not on the tough guys but those in their orbit left to ponder their own complicity and sort through the emotional rubble in the mafiosos’ wake. To put things in “Sopranos” terms, we’re talking about the tension between family and capital-F, italicized Famiglia.
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The anthropological inquests take the shape of a coming-of-age plot for steely-eyed fifteen-year-old Chiara (Swamy Rotolo, a dead ringer for Dixie D’Amelio charged with the steady intensity of Monica Bellucci that time she read off a list of auteurs), the weighty awareness awaiting her foreshadowed by her big sister’s sweet eighteen party that begins the film. The girl has an inkling that Claudio (Swamy’s actual dad Claudio Rotolo, another one of the half-dozen family members tapped for their natural chemistry with one another) may not be an ordinary father, but she’s entirely unprepared for the shootout that cuts the party short and sends him into hiding. To avoid the sensational appeal discordant to his neorealist ethic, Carpignano leaves this and much of the other violence offscreen, a deft choice that also places us in line with Chiara’s fearful curiosity about what went down and what it means.
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Her attitude growing ever more sullen and volatile — Rotolo excels at exuding quiet menace despite her slight stature, surely a frequent household stance her character learned from her father — she ditches schooling and ventures out searching for some answers. As she sticks her nose around some dangerous places, her privileged upbringing gives way to a series of difficult lessons in quick succession. Some concern the core moral quandary of how a person can think of themselves as innocent when their comfort comes secondhand from the business of death. The most fascinating pertain to the complicated ethnic makeup of the region, the dark-haired Chiara wedged between the fairer-complexioned Euro-girls looking down on her and the Romani kids she looks down on. For her, the inevitable disillusionment about our seemingly godlike parents being human, after all, comes with a sobering newfound consciousness of her place in society.
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The third act compels Chiara to move her ethical balancing from the theoretical to the immediate, faced with a sum total of monstrosity that Meadow Soprano never looked in the eye. At this juncture, the film makes its most daring proposition: that rather than turn her back on her family or turn a blind eye to them, Chiara would instead embrace and be willingly subsumed by the deep current of evil running through her bloodline. Naturally, she’s only able to do so because the work of a criminal has been demystified for her as it has us, represented by Carpignano as tedious and banal when it doesn’t involve gunplay. He never lets the transport jobs play like a movie, so Chiara never sees them that way, viewing this lifestyle as plausible and attainable. Before the unadorned lens of Carpignano, it’s no different than the passages of adolescent ennui that see her and her buddies bumming around to bumping Italo-pop.
“A Chiara” caps off Carpignano’s Calabrian triptych in unexpected fashion by orienting itself around a less-marginalized population, reenergizing his style from the brink of stagnation in confronting questions of power that haven’t cropped up before. He’s not quite deconstructing the gangster picture, but he succeeds in draining all its allure. We can see this demimonde through the accessible vantage of an outsider, horrified and yet drawn in all the same. [B+]