OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA: ALESSANDRO CASSIGOLI, CASEY KAUFMAN: VITTORIA (2024)

Reenacting their own lives, and we can't look away

It might be very hard for a child who has grown up in an orphanage in Eastern Europe to smile. So when Vittoria does, it's a breakthrough, even though we haven't seen her manage to speak. This is the climax of a film that reenacts the process by which a couple living near Mount Vesuvius adopts a young girl from Belarus. Not only the couple but apparently their three existing sons take part in the film, but it plays like fiction.

Watching the film is compelling and a little disturbing. It takes a while to draw you in. Most of the dialogue is in "impenetravle dialect" (as Lee Marshall puts it in his ScreenDaily review), requiring subtitles even in most of Italy as well as here and alienating this longtime student of standard Italian. Jasmine (Anna Amato), who runs a beauty salon and has the experimental hairdo to prove it, has something hard about her, and her fixation on adopting a girl, based on an idea of her recently deceased father, seems willful. Her husband Rico has a successful carpentry and cabinetry business. He's not on board, and is more focused on starting up another branch of his business on Capri. The youngest son thinks this will take away attention from him. This seems a little abstract anyway, based on a disturbing, recurrant dream where a blonde girl runs into Jasmine's arms.

However, the film grows layers as it goes. Being based on family history, it has numerous secondary stories, other directions it could and partly does go. The eldest son who works for Jasmine in her salon, has doubts, then decides he does indeed want to be a hair stylist, then has a panic attack and subquently decides to move to Milan (the party for him when he goes off is a lesson in Italian warmth and togetherness). Rico opposes the adoption idea - to which there are so many legitimate objections - but gradually gives in to appease Jasmine, showing that for now, the marriage is solid. He still doesn't make the first trip to the mainland adoption agency. There are details about the complexity and costliness of international adoption here.

Clilmactic adoption sequences in movies are powerfully effective and this one is no different in that regard. For a whlie you hold your breath and forget you're watching a movie. It's a simple moment, literally wordless where it matters most since nobody can get the little girl to speak. The next day they try something else to see if the girl, who's called Vittoria, has some solid cognitive function: getting her to draw a circle. But she's too shy or too frightened to pick up the pencil. Suddenly Rico comes forward and grabs the girl in his arms and says "Forget that circle nonsense," and he and Jasmine Just hug her and kiss her.

This movie gives you an experience. It recaptures and references the actual experience of the actors, who are non-actors. It also provides information about the rererenced experiences, specifically international adoption from the Italian point of view. Another thread is the death of Jasmine's father, which is found to have been caused by inhaling toxic dust at the factory where he worked. The film provides a portrait of a certain social level and lifestyle in conteporary Italy that may not have been captured so precisely before. This is where the filmmakers' growing artistry shows most subtly.

Why does it make me uncomfortable? Precisely because of its invasion of lives, of its not being fiction, and specifically because the adoption experience is so ambivalent and troubling and difficult. But it grabs you. The filmmaking team of Cassigoli and Kaufman, whose three similarly conceived and executed and apparently interlocking films leading up to this one, all shot in the port town of Torre Annunziata, south of Naples, I have not seen, know what they are doing.

Vittoria, 78 mins., premiered at Orrizonti section of Venice Aug. 30, 2024, also shown at Reykjavík, São Paulo, Thessaloniki, and other internatinal festivals. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Lincoln Center, May. 29-June 5, 2025.

Showtimes:
Sunday, June 1 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman
Tuesday, June 3 at 9:15pm

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