A Chiara

What’s best about A Chiara is its totality of naturalism and subjectivity — how it humanely complicates a teenager’s newfound self-possession, so that we admire her quest for clarity and reckoning about her family, while worrying how it will affect the decision she makes about her future.

For all its social-realist tendencies, A Chiara is told in a wonderfully fluid and poetic fashion.

As Chiara, Rotolo’s face dominates the screen in closeup for much of the film, and she manages to look very young and yet very worldly wise at the same time. Another very impressive achievement from Carpignano.

Carpignano once again uses a tight, intimate character focus to take a wider look at larger political and cultural issues in this region. In the poetically, humanistically crafted A Chiara, he also manages to flip the Mafia movie on its head, and in doing so, challenges the mythology that keeps these shadowy systems in power.

Carpignano’s focus here on 15-year-old Chiara (a radiant Swamy Rotolo . . . is a natural way of prepping the audience’s sympathies, but he aims beyond easy generational assumptions, and even more noticeably than in his sophomore work, he’s imbibed some lessons from Martin Scorsese (who also exec produced that earlier film) in refusing to presume a judgmental stance.

As a coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old forced to reconsider her place in her family after finally recognizing their place in the world, “A Chiara” can be vague and heavy-handed (even at the same time). As the final layer of a mosaic that renders Gioia Tauro a microcosm of the modern world . . . it’s hard to imagine a more harrowing or distressingly unsettled finish.

Carpignano’s impressionistic plot and pseudo-naturalistic style also tends to boil down human emotions so as to only suggest rather than reveal complexity. The limiting style and characterizations in A Chiara are only so thoughtful.

This is a pretty decent film, about a teenager who realises the somewhat shady line of work her father is involved in. I did think the shaky camerawork was a little distracting, although it perhaps does give it a feel of realism - a bit of a documentary feel, or sense, to it perhaps. I thought the main character was well portrayed. It's sort of a film of two halves - there are scenes of her with her family, where things seem fine and scenes of her doggedly trying to find out what 'lies beneath' as it were. The nuisance, I felt, was at the end - I wasn't really sure quite where the main character stood - what the future held. I can't say its a bad film - its somewhat thoughtful and worth a watch overall I'd say but I was left feeling a little confused about what the ultimate outcome was.

Swamy Rotolo é inexpressiva, o filme não me envolveu com ela, o que tornou toda a experiência desagradável. Ela vai em busca de pistas para o desaparecimento do pai, e aí o roteiro, além de umas soluções meio bestas (a cena dela fugindo da assistente social) não se aprofunda nem nos dramas da jovem, muito menos na complexa situação estrutural a que o pai (a essa altura do campeonato, um personagem mais interessante) vem vivendo. As irmãs então, ou as amigas da escola, são peças descartáveis.