The idea of a teenage girl discovering her father is in the mob gave us one of the great moments in television history, when Meadow in The Sopranos asked her dad Tony: “Are you in the mafia?” Now the Italian film-maker Jonas Carpignano has made this the central plank in this gripping and unnerving drama, effectively the third in his neo-neorealist “Calabrian” movies, after Mediterranea in 2015 and A Ciambra two years later. Both of these films used non-professionals from the region, and now Carpignano is audaciously bringing back minor personae from A Ciambra and putting them in the spotlight.
Swamy Rotolo, played Chiara Guerrasio in the earlier film and this new one, effectively gives us her terrifying and even tragic coming-of-age story, with her own family playing clan members. Chiara starts the film aged 15, attending her sister’s 18th birthday party: the film ends, enigmatically, with a flashforward coda episode showing Chiara’s own 18th. It is at the first party that young, innocent Chiara witnesses disturbing violence outside in the street: her dad, Claudio (Claudio Rotolo), has his car torched and he disappears.
But where has he gone? No one will tell her, and Chiara enters what feels like a dream state, or nightmare state, in which people are literally robbed of the power of speech when she tactlessly demands to know the truth. Everything she thought she knew about her family and her own life is a lie. She even discovers a secret bunker under her house: a hidden layer of secrecy and shame beneath her own existence. It is from the internet that she discovers the truth (very like Meadow Soprano, incidentally); she confronts him and has to decide what sort of life she wants for herself, especially as the courts and social services want to separate her from her family and put her in foster care outside the evil influences of the ’Ndrangheta mob.
As Chiara, Rotolo’s face dominates the screen in closeup for much of the film, and she manages to look very young and yet very worldly wise at the same time. Another very impressive achievement from Carpignano.
• A Chiara is released on Friday in cinemas.
