Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, Issaka Sawadogo, Beatrice Gnonko
Intro:
… a dazzling epic about the fragility of dreams …
Early in Io Capitano, the film’s teenage protagonist Seydou (Seydou Sarr) drops to his knees beside a dying woman (Beatrice Gnonko) in the Nigerien desert. En route to Italy with a group of other refugees, she has collapsed from exhaustion. As Seydou takes the woman’s arm she begins to levitate, floating by his side while he pulls her along. In a tableau that recalls Mati Diop’s phantasmagoric film Atlantics, a wide-shot shows the woman’s emerald scarf rippling in the wind, her figure shimmering under the sun’s golden glow. The camera suddenly cuts back to Seydou as he walks on with the group, revealing the moment of ostensive magical realism to be only a fleeting mirage. In spite of Seydou’s compassion, he could not save his fellow traveller.
Matteo Garrone’s chimeric odyssey follows cousins Seydou and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) on their voyage from their home in Dakar, Senegal to Italy where they hope to make a new life. On their journey across land and sea they encounter kidnapping Mafiosos, kind strangers, people traffickers and spirit guides, battling for survival with every breath.
Seydou’s hallucination in the desert neatly crystallises the film as a whole, which is permeated by impossible dreams. Seydou and Moussa dream of a utopic life in Europe but find it incredibly difficult to attain. Likewise, a spirit visits Seydou’s dreams, carrying messages to his faraway mother that she may or may not receive. The film itself similarly unfolds like an ungraspable dream. Drenched in hazy swathes of lurid colour, the narrative drifts from point to point, moments of beauty (as when Seydou builds a fountain in the desert) languidly fading into darkness (despite its splendour, the fountain is draining precious resources).
Seydou’s dream rapidly becomes a full-blown nightmare when he is imprisoned and tortured for ransom, and later forced to captain a rickety boat full of people across the Mediterranean Sea. But even in these moments Seydou refuses to lose hope, finding friendship in another prisoner and seeking help for a bleeding pregnant woman. While replete with suffering, the film avoids devolving into a fest of despair because the characters at its helm are endlessly optimistic and deeply resilient.
Importantly, Sarr and Fall endow their characters with complexity and depth, each giving an identity to the often-amorphous cinematic figure of the refugee. Indeed, much of the film plays out across Sarr’s emotive face, his boyish features sensitively morphing from glee to misery. Through the nuanced performances of Sarr and Fall, Garrone (Gomorrah, Pinocchio) weaves a dazzling epic about the fragility of dreams and two migrants’ unwavering effort to keep theirs alive.
