by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s movie was A
Ciambra (“Ciambra” is the name of
a small town in southern Italy inhabited mostly by Roma people, better known as
Gypsies, and “A” is simply the Italian for “the”), a San Diego Italian Film
Festival entry shown at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park and also
Italy’s official submission for the 2017 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy
Award. The movie was followed by a post-film discussion which revealed a fact
about it I hadn’t realized and which profoundly affected my reading of the
film: the actors playing the extended family of the film’s central character,
15-year-old Pio (Pio Amato), are in fact his real family: a grandfather who
dies during the story, his parents and his six older siblings, some of whom
have started having kids of their own. There had been a brief mention in the
introduction by several Italian Film Festival officials that the film was
“semi-documentary” in character, but I hadn’t realized what that meant until I
saw the closing credits and a whole bunch of people with the last name “Amato”
were credited with the leading roles. The film has been hailed as
ground-breaking in its treatment of Roma people and an attempt to break through
the stereotypes surrounding them, but there’s one negative stereotype of the
Roma this film totally reinforces: “They’re all crooks.”
It seems the entire
Amato family survives on the income from whatever they can steal and sell on
the open market, or collect ransom from the rightful owners (according to an
imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the writer-director, Jonas Carpignano, first met the
Amatos when Roma people stole a Fiat full of camera equipment from the location
of one of his previous productions and he had to pay ransom to get it back),
and one wonders whether any of the Roma actually have jobs and attempt to make honest, legal
livings. The film was billed as a coming-of-age story for Pio, and also a story
of family obligations given that Pio’s older brother Cosimo gets him started
and shows him the criminal ropes until he is arrested and sent to prison (in a
marvelously ironic scene, when he gets out — he’s given compassionate release
to attend his grandfather’s funeral — he tells Pio that the Roma people are
treated with respect in prison, unlike the Blacks), whereupon Pio hooks up with
a community of African immigrants who are also involved in crime. They’re from
various African countries but the one who particularly befriends Pio is Ayiva
(Koudous Seibon), who’s from Burkina Faso and seems to be the only person in
the movie who genuinely likes Pio and wants to help him. Alas, at the end of
the film, once Cosimo gets out, he plans to loot Ayiva’s storeroom of stolen
goods and he wants Pio to help him, and Pio has a moral dilemma — stand with my
brother or stand with my friend? Of course I was hoping he would tell his
brother to go fuck himself and stand with his friend, but the opposite happens
and Cosimo tells Pio that by sticking up for his biological family (and for the
Roma people in general against an even more oppressed minority of immigrants),
he has finally “become a man.” Cosima initiates Pio into manhood by buying him
a blow job from a prostitute (when this scene arrived I noted how Federico Fellini
seems to have set a permanent template for the depiction of prostitutes in
Italian movies), and the film comes to a grim ending.
One of the odd aspects of
A Ciambra is that ethnic Italians
are hardly seen: they come in as authority figures (two carabinieri come to the Amato residence looking for copper
they’ve stolen from a construction site — a strange sort of crime because it
would seem to be hard for crooks to dispose of this stuff and get money for it,
though it happens often enough they must have ways to “fence” construction
supplies), priests (at least one priest, who officiates at grandfather’s funeral), and one odd character
whose connection to the story is pretty ambiguous. He owns a large house in
town and Pio works out a plan to steal the security code for his property by
pretending to have lost his soccer ball on the premises — “I kicked it over,”
he tells the man — and then let himself in and steal whatever he can grab. Only
he’s caught, and the owner seems to have some sort of connection with the Amato
family because he knows exactly who Pio is and regards his crime as a personal
betrayal — so much so that he says he’s going to charge them for everything Pio
stole. Shortly after that mysterious assailants burn down the Amatos’ house and
the impression I got — and some of the other audience members did, too — was
that the homeowner had organized this arson attack as payback. While I was
watching A Ciambra I didn’t like it — I had a
hard time staying awake through all those scenes of family dysfunction and I
found myself invidiously comparing the film to the Brazilian production City
of God, a far better depiction of
teenage boys living a life of crime because they’re so beaten down by poverty
and racial and social oppression they don’t see any alternative — though the
post-film discussion made me feel a bit better about it.
