To Chiara

Lottery West Films/Perth Festival
UWA Somerville

 

By Wolfgang von Flugelhorn

To Chiara is the third film by writer-director Jonas Carpignano set and shot in the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro and featuring local non-professional actors playing versions of themselves. Mediterranea (2015) and A Ciambra (2017) deal respectively with the local African refugee and Roma communities; To Chiara (2021) delves into the world of the Calabrian mafia or ’Ndrangheta. 

 

Actors, characters and communities reappear in all three films. Swami Rotolo (who plays the 15-year-old Chiara) first auditioned as an extra for A Ciambra at the age of 10, when Carpagnano had just started writing To Chiara. He rewrote the script for her as he got to know her and watched her grow up; her real-life family also play her fictional family in the film. 

 

The use of real locations and non-professional actors places Carpignano’s work in the tradition of Italian neo-realist cinema, along with his focus on working-class and minority communities, and on children or young adults as central characters. However, his films reflect a different era from the ruins of post-war Italy depicted by Rossellini in films like Rome Open City or Paisan. Contemporary Giaio Tauro is a microcosm of a globalised world in which conflict and injustice are more marginalised or hidden from everyday sight. 

 

The writer-director’s process with actors is similar in some respects to that of Mike Leigh, though the development of the screenplay is less dependent on improvisation. The actors never see the entire script, and only know what their characters knows when each scene is shot. This arguably gives their performances an extra level of realism, especially as they are mostly non-professionals. 

 

Instead of being a typical gangster-movie focused on the criminals and their activities, To Chiara is a domestic drama that focuses on the immediate family of a single ‘Ndrangheta member and more specifically on the title character. Unlike the Neapolitan Cammora or Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the ’Ndrangheta is literally a ‘family’ of blood-kin and thus even more impermeable from without and bound by loyalty from within. This sharpens the element of Greek tragedy in the film in terms of the conflict between family ties, personal ethics and social responsibility. 

 

The film begins with a long scene depicting an 18th birthday party for Chiara’s sister Giulia (Grecia Rotolo) which is reminiscent of the (much longer and more lavish) opening wedding scenes of Coppola’s The Godfather and Cimino’s The Deerhunter. The scene sets the stage for the catastrophe that ensues, and establishes the key family members and relationships, including Chiara and Guilia, their little sister Giorgia (Giorgia Rotolo), their mother Carmela (Carmela Fumo) and their father Claudio (Claudio Rotolo). In the course of the scene peripheral cues foreshadow the fact that Claudio and most of the other men in the extended family are members of the ‘Ndrangheta, apparently unbeknownst to Chiara, Guilia and Giorgia, who clearly adore and are adored by their father. 

 

At the end of this scene, a car-bombing in the street precipitates Claudio’s disappearance, Chiara’s gradual discovery of his criminal identity, her own increasingly aggressive ‘acting-out’, her attempted removal from the family and town by a social worker in order to break the chain of criminality, her confrontation with her father in his underground lair, and her final autonomous decision about her own future. 

 

Carpignano has stated that the film is about families and father-daughter relationships, as well about finding one’s own moral compass. As such it’s a coming-of-age story that has much in common with its precursor at Somerville, Murina (reviewed in a previous blogpost). However, he also describes To Chiara as part of a trilogy that represents a composite portrait of a real town. 

 

Gioia Tauro is the largest shipping container port in Italy, and one of the largest in Europe. It also has a history of mafia and neo-fascist involvement in political and industrial violence and corruption, gang warfare and the importation of illegal weapons and drugs (a report in 2006 estimated that 80% of cocaine imported into Europe from Colombia came via Gioia Tauro). In the 1970s the port and the city of Reggio to the south were the site of the so-called ‘Reggio revolt’ (which was infiltrated by neo-fascists and backed by the mafia) against the centre-left Italian government, followed by the ‘Gioia Tauro massacre’ (a train bombing in which scores of unionists and workers were killed or injured) as well as the subsequent ‘Ndrangeta Wars’ between various mafia clans in which hundreds of people are estimated to have been murdered.

 

To Chiara doesn’t touch on these ramifications of the mafia’s activities (nor do most films about organised crime). Claudio and his siblings are presented as largely sympathetic if morally compromised figures; though in one scene they’re shown handing large quantities of cocaine; there’s a reference to another mafioso’s daughter being punished for disobedience by having her face scarred with acid; and Chiara herself ‘acts out’ by throwing a firework in another girl’s face. There’s no sense of the political, industrial, social or cultural scale of endemic corruption, exploitation, violence and toxic masculinity that the mafia represents – as there is, say, in the novels of Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan Quartet came to mind while watching To Chiara. Instead, Chiara’s story is largely presented as a story about moral choice. 

 

The most interesting scenes evoke a dreamlike state that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland or the films of David Lynch. These scenes convey Ciara’s confused and fragmentary sense of what she’s experiencing or remembering: beginning with the car-bombing, followed by her waking at night and glimpsing her parents’ hurried preparations for her father’s flight, and leading to her discovery in the bathroom of a hidden bunker under the house, and her subsequent descent into a literal underworld (according to Carpignano, when this scene was shot Swami Rotolo was unaware of the bunker and was simply told to search the bathroom). 

 

These scenes are hauntingly shot by cinematographer Tim Curtin (who also worked on the previous films in the trilogy). Most of the film is shot on 16mm using a hand-held camera to convey a sense of documentary realism; in the ‘dream-state’ scenes, images are deliberately blurred and truncated. They are also accompanied by an almost hallucinatory use of sound (by composers Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin and sound designer Giuseppe Tripodi) in which voices are submerged and words become indistinguishable. Much of the rest of the film is accompanied by a soundtrack of Italian pop music. All of this has the effect of placing us inside Chiara’s head. 

 

The film ends with an enigmatic and uneasy coda in Urbino, where Chiara appears to have found a new and more comfortably middle-class life. This ending felt somewhat tacked on to me, and left many questions unanswered, both about the family removal/relocation program, and about the limitations of Carpignano’s approach. However, I’ve not seen his previous films, which perhaps provide a broader canvas; and perhaps his composite portrait of Gioia Tauro is not yet complete. 

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To Chiara screens from Feb 7 to 13 at UWA Somerville as part of Perth Festival/Lotterywest Films.

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Wolfgang von Flugelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flugelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He is editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flugelhorn where he holds a chair in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.