FRANCESCA RISO AND ALESSIO GALLO IN L'INTERVALLO

Camorra moment: little birds that cannot fly away

Winner of the Critics’ Prize in the Orizzonti section of the 2012 Venice Film Festival, this portrait of two prematurely sophisticated adolescents momentarily thrown together under the eye of the Neapolitan Camorra is a sweet, low-keyed little first feature by documentary filmmaker Leonardo Di Costanzo, who also wrote the screenplay together with Mariangela Barbarnente (Orchestra of Piazza Virtorio) and Maurizio Braucci (Gomorraa and Reality). The "intermission" time comes for the shy and submissive (but tall, plump, monumental) 15-year-old ice cream and slushy (graniti) vendor Salvatore (Alessio Gallo) and the compulsively defiant and self-aware 17-year-old Veronica (Francesca Riso), two very particular personalities and previous non-actors found through a long elimination process. Salvatore and Veronica already know each other by sight because that's the nature of this remote, ugly, urban Naples neighborhood. She's being given a dramatic slap on the wrist for having wronged the local Camorra capo by having an affair with a brother from the enemy clan, given a day of quarantine with Salvatore as her jailer in a big empty building. It's a giant, long-abandoned mental institution, though that's not mentioned. Why Veronica is being punished comes out to "Toto" only late in the course of their time together and they are very, very slow to drop their guard and bond with each other on this hot summer day. L'Intervallo is of course a deliberately very crabwise way of looking at la Camorra -- one that offers the possibility of revealing differently, more subtly than any direct approach the gangster clan's impact on Naples society. Some viewers, and some Italian critics, inevitably find this little story banal and flat, unworthy somehow of its awesome and disturbing larger context of crime, exploitation, murder and ravages on the landscape and culture delineated in other films, notably Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (NYFF 2008). But were the stories underlying De Sica's Sciuscià or Ladri di biciclette "important"? Indeed this is a slight film that takes almost 50 minutes to get going, but also a delicate, precise one, resonant in the mind afterward. There's no other picture of the Camorra quite like it.

Veronica and "Toto" both chafe at this shared confinement but accept it, like the birds in a cage that rattle the sides of it but when the door's opened stay inside, because what's outside is even scarier -- the imagine of the film's succinctly defining epigraph. In his poetically turned Venice review on the Italian website Film.it. Ludovica Sanfelice acknowledges the justice of this image. He also notes the deep sense of documentary background in the film's handheld camera work, its careful choice of shots, the precise ear of its Neapolitan dialogue, the skillful direction of the two non-actors and the just use of the mournful setting, an abandoned psychiatric hospital. These very different but equally worldly-wise young people share confessions, stories, games and travel fantasies and in so doing briefly escape the stifling domination of the gangster clans. The metaphor of the birds is further borne out because Salvatore's father is a bird fancier and has taught him secrets of their habits.

The two youth's playful bonding takes up much of the last part of the film, but of course the key moments are the two, early and late, when the gangster henchmen appear who created this moment. They are Bernardino (Carmine Paternoster) and his sidekick Mimmo (Salvatore Ruocco) and when Francesca is passive to Bernardino's caresses in the evening when he comes to set her free we know she essentially belongs to them, as Salvatore is their servant if needed when he takes money for his trouble and is safely released to return to his ice cream cart. Everything is the same, and everything is different.

L'Intervallo, 86 mins., debuted at Venice as part of the Orizzonti series Sept. 4, 2012 and opened in Italy the following day. It also showed at the London and Buenos Aires festivals. A French theatrical release is set for April 24, 2013. Screened for this review as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art joint series New Directors/New Films (March 20-31, 2013)

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