A boy’s penchant for electrifying adventures often gives us a captivating movie experience. Modern film-makers like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro have weaved nice whimsical tales from the thought-provoking child’s point of view. Gabriele Salvatores’ adventurous and poetic coming-of-age tale “I’m Not Scared” (2003) has the rare finesse in portraying a boy’s world. The film was based on Niccolo Ammaniti sensational Italian novel (Niccolo wrote the script for the movie). Deemed as a suspense story in the vein of Hitchcock classics, “I’m Not Scared” is set in the sun-drenched, idyllic village of Southern Italy – the setting which cinephile would have come across in Italian masterpieces like “Cinema Paradiso” & “Il Postino”.
The film commences in a dark underground place, where water
is dripping and the words ‘I’m not scared’ is written with chalk on the rocky
wall. The shot dissolves to a bucolic wheat field, where a lone black crow
appears as some sort of ominous omen for the events that are to unfold. A group
of 10 year old are joyously racing across the wheat field. As the kids reach
their final point, a bully of the group humiliates an overweight girl, and our
protagonist Michele (Giuseppe Christiano) steps in to take a dangerous dare.
They get to an abandoned, dilapidated house and Michele is dared to walk on a beam,
dangling high above the ground. This incident pretty much establishes the
nature of Michele, who steps up when things go haywire. As the kids head-back to
home, Michele’s little sister Maria (Giulia Matturo) says she has lost her
glass. Michele asks her to wait near the field and goes to that broken-down house,
where the spectacles lie atop a sheet metal.
He moves the sheet to find a deep hole and expects to finds,
as in adventure stories, a cave full of treasure. But, what he sees shocks him:
a small human foot. Michele is baffled by what he saw in the hole and takes his
sister on bicycle to home, welcomed by a frustrated mom (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon).
However, the kids are elated to see their father Pino’s (Dino Abbrescia) truck.
Pino looks like a ideal, loving father: arm-wrestles with Michele and promises to stay with the children for few
days. The next day, out of curiosity, Michele goes to that deserted place with
deep hole and removes the lid. But, there is no foot, only a sack is lying on
the ground. He brings his head a little forward, trying to get a full view of
the hole. And, all of a sudden, a little unwashed, chained, blonde boy with
eyes closed and hands forward comes to Michele’s view. Startled by what he
found, Michele’s immediately closes the lid and runs. We could feel the
thudding of his heart as Michele crashes his bicycle on a small rock and goes
flying. He lies there unconscious for quite some time.
Michele still doesn’t know what to make of this shocking
discovery and when he arrives at home, his father gives him an earful for
wandering around. At night, under covers, Michele relates the presence of the ‘boy
in hole’ to a fantasy tale (about blonde evil twin) he has read. He gradually
gathers his courage and goes back to the hole, where the blonde boy, hiding
under the sack, asks for water, then for something to eat. Next day, Michele
asks the village’s shop-keeper “If someone’s hungry, what can they buy with 500
liras?” A friendship develops between the two ten year old boys and Michele is
very careful to avoid the shady young man (his playmate Skull’s elder brother),
who now and then, stops by to take a look at the blonde boy. Michele still
finds it hard to grasp why someone would put a boy inside a hole. The blonde
boy thinks that he is in the hole because he is dead. One evening, Michele
finds out who the blonde boy is, when his parents, their neighbors and friends are
calmly watching over the news.
Although “I’m Not Scared” falls under the crime/thriller
genre, it neither boasts incredible revelations nor infuses dangerously silly
villains to charge up the boys’ adventure. The answer to why the blonde boy is in
the hole is revealed very earlier in the movie, as Michele searches for a pot
to fill with water in the abandoned house. The clues to, who the blonde boy is,
lies around Michele, but he is little too innocent to grasp it. Questions might
arise on how a 10 year old could be so innocent, but the rural, ‘cut-off-from-modern-technology’
setting (it is important to note that the movie is set in the late 1970’s)
provides some answer to the boys’ behavior. So, the film would have a great impact on us,
if it is seen as a coming-of-age tale with taut thriller elements.
Spoilers Ahead
As revealed by few cinephiles in the ‘IMDb discussion boards’,
the kidnapping motive of the villagers materialized due to segregation that
existed between Northern and Southern Italy in the 70’s. The southerners is said to have experienced
extreme poverty, starting from the end of World War II, and the crisis reached
a threshold point by the 1970’s. That’s when few of the southeners devised
plans for kidnapping wealthy Northerners with Swiss bank accounts. A series of
kidnappings during that period even made the Italian government to pass legislation for preventing rich victims from paying up the ransoms. The justice
system imposed heavy punishment on the kidnappers and quick arrests were made (which
somehow explains why everything goes bad for the kidnappers). These facts could
shed some light on the villagers’ insensitive and ambiguous attitude towards
the boy.
The chief elements to admire in the film are the
characterizations, the two boys’ performance and the sumptuous mise en scene. The
very first scene, when Michele chooses to help his sister, over winning the
race and how he saves another girl from humiliation perfectly foreshadows how
Michele would act at the time of a crisis. Writer Ammaniti wonderfully mixes
the compassionate, self-respectful nature of Michele with that of his innocent
childhood beliefs: in ogres or witches. Ammaniti imbues the child’s belief in
preternatural things to the perspective of blonde boy, Filippo too, as he asks
to Michele “Are you my guardian angel?” The kidnapping event and the resulting
discovery just serves as a kind of wrecking ball that derails the boy’s trust
on adult world. Ammaniti and director Salvatores also subtly stage the scene,
when father Pino brings home the ‘Gondola’ (boat). It is presented as the adults’
yearning for a materialistic life and an escape from the poverty-stricken
surroundings.
Both Maria and Michele have never seen a gondola and asks
what it is, while in a later scene, Filippo talks on general terms about ‘veliero’
(a sail ship -- a portrait of it is seen when Filippo’s mother is appealing to
kidnappers on TV). These simple, unnoticeable scenes imply the contrast between
the isolated life of Michele and bourgeois upbringing of Filippo. The mother,
Anna’s frustrated and world-weary attitude is also borne from this yearning for
better life. She talks about going to beach after all this is over and at one
point, urges Michele to promise her that ‘he will get out of this town when he
grows up’. The other kidnappers are also not vilified in the way Hollywood
movies tend to do. Pino’s pompous friend Sergio seems to be a family man,
despite choosing to murder the boy. Felice, the bully, just seems to be wearing
the roughneck attitude to conceal his inner weakness.
The most intriguing
and sublime scene in the movie happens when Michele trades the secret about
Filippo to his friend, in exchange for a toy truck. Later, when Michele is in
the hole with Filippo, he is caught by Felice, beaten and put into the car.
Michele stares into the front of car as his friend sits with head bowed. The
betrayal (for a car ride) rankles Michele as he plays with the truck for one last time, and puts
it down by also thinking about the way he has betrayed Filippo for a mere toy
truck . With only eye contacts and little gestures, director Salvatores have amazingly
assembled this sequence. Similar to classic Hollywood films, “To Kill a Mocking
Bird” & “The Night of the Hunter”, “Stand by Me”, “I’m Not Scared” too travels
through a plot, where innocent children encounter the darker side of humanity.
But still, the dazzling camera movements and golden landscape diffuses a unique
atmosphere, which grips our attention till the end.
Salvatores and cinematographer Italo Petriccione bathes the
breathtaking wheat field in the amber-cyan palette (reminded me of Spanish
auteur Victor Erice’ films and Del Toro’s “The Devil’s Backbone"). Michele’s
final journey to save Filippo is awesomely visualized as we see various
nocturnal animals, coming to the surface, indicating the dangers lying ahead. The
‘hole’ is symbolically represented as something evil. And, every time Michele
looks into the hole and learns something about Filippo, he loses his allusions
about the outside world. At one point, Michele promises Filippo that he would
back next day, before he is betrayed to Felice. Later, he promises his father
not to seek Filippo anymore. The next day, he wanders between the fields
contemplating and tearing-up inside on the two promises he had made the day
before. On the horizon, we gradually see a ‘combine’ harvesting the fields,
indicating an end of season as well as the termination of Michele’s childhood. All the child actors give a spectacular,
uninhibited performance. The climax tends to be a bit dramatic and sentimental,
but the final image has a great painterly quality to it.
“I’m Not Scared” (105 minutes) is a genuinely thrilling and
emotionally satisfying coming-of-age tale with a unique atmosphere and
authentic performances.
Trailer
Roger Ebert's Review
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