ANNA BELLEZZA AND MATILDE GIANNINI IN STEEL

Coming of age by the steel mill, and by the Mediterranean

Steel (Accaio), a feature by Stefano Mordini, formerly a documentary filmmaker, centers upon the small industrial town of Piombino, along the coast, southwest of Siena, in view of the island of Elba. Vacationers pass through but don't stop. In the foreground are two sexy 14-year-old girls, Anna (Matilde Giannini) and Francesca (Anna Bellezza), best friends, who study at school and dream of escaping, while finishing their last summer after middle school and before entering the liceo. Anna's older brother Alessio (an excellent Michele Riondino) not only works at the Lucchini steel mill but at night steals electrical cable to earn extra money, whose source he hides from his mother. The father, apparently a drunk, is off somewhere seeking his fortune away from the factory and no longer in touch. A declining economy and technological unemployment trouble the area's longtime source of livelihood.

Mordini is interested in family and friend relationships and undercurrents of discontent. But a certain working class grimness of surroundings is offset by the eye candy of the girls and the young men, with breathless closeups of faces and bodies that Ken Loach or the Dardennes would not have bothered with and which spoil what could be a truly authentic setting by introducing a soapy flavor. There are even softcore porn undressing scenes and sexy semi-nude men and the girls kissing to lend a light lesbian touch. We may be in a community dependent on a steel mill, but the girls wander around in the sexy outfits of the day, booties, loose T's, tiny jean shorts, and strip to swim in the Mediterranean. Things for them aren't so bad, except, like all teenagers, they're bored. They lounge around lazily and sexily on their beds, or exchange blank looks.

Clearly Mordini is seeking to combine a moody coming-of-ager with realistic semi-documentary depictions of the working class milieu, but he seriously undercuts it with the desultory unfolding of scenes and the come-hither photography of attractive young male and female flesh -- which, however, does not conceal the diagrammatic, expository nature of the fragmentary dialogue.

The most ambitiously shot and edited sequence in a skating rink, when the two girls betray and desert each other and follow different attractions, achieves a brief sense of complexity and urgency, and then typically is suddenly dropped, the next scene in the light of day of the girls' housing unit, as if nothing had happened. Later, a trip to Elba for the two girls is cancelled in favor of Anna's birthday sexual debut with a returned friend of Alessio's, Mattia (Francesco Turbanti) who now works at the factory. There's also Alessio's super-pretty blonde ex-girlfriend, Elena (Vittoria Puccini), who returns to join the factory's management staff and can't understand Alessio's contentment with the steel mill worker life. These are quickly sketched events. They can seem superficial, but Mordini also can surprise with his rapid jump cutting, as when he suddenly shows Anna in school studying Latin. All this complexity is interesting and the film despite its visual missteps has delicacy, but it fails to tell a compelling story -- as Ken Loach or the Dardennes definitely would have done.

Steell is an adaptation of the novel by the same name by Silvia Avallone, which won the Italian Campiello prize in 2010 and readers' prizes from the French magazines L'Express and Elle in 2011 and 2012. From the novel, judging by comments from those who've read it, little remains here of its real in-depth focus on the factory life. Scenes of the foundry are pasted in, with Alessio occasionally there wearing the Lucchini factory uniform and interacting with secondary characters, but otherwise there's little integration of the factory's gritty dirt and swing-shift exhaustion into the scenes of home life. The oscillation between the depressing factory setting and its depressed social world and the sensuality of the young girls in bloom weakens both and confounds the viewer. The over-intimate photography, good at other times, is by Marco Onorato.

Accaio, 95 mins., debuted at the Authors' Week at Venice, Sept. 2012. It opened in Italy 15 Nov. 2012, and in France (as D'Acier 5 June 2013 (Allociné press rating: 3.2). Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Film Society's New Italian Cinema series, November 2013, in which is shows Friday, November 15, at 6:30 pm at Landmark's Clay Theatre.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.