I'm Not Scared (2003/2004 ) (AKA Io
non ho paura)
Note: Some spoilers. Don't let the
horrible anglicized title of this film lead you astray.
This is a wonderful film and one that you should seeing
knowing absolutely nothing about it.
I don't have the kind of friends
that I did when I was 10 years old and lived in Italy.
Jesus, does anyone?
Okay, I'm poking a little fun at
this film by paraphrasing a line from "Stand by Me"
and putting it in the context of "I'm not Scared."
But truth be told, although this film reminds me of
that Rob Reiner film as well as last year's Italian
import "Respiro," and a little bit of the festival
fave "The Nature of Nicholas," this is an awesome
and breath-taking film and one that nobody should
fail to see.
Centering on Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano),
a ten-year-old Italian boy who lives in a small country
villa with his family, the piece begins exactly as
a typical coming-of-age story might. Michele and his
friends enjoy playing a sort of truth-or-dare type
game until one loser must ultimately do what the toughest
boy of the group demands. But soon the film segues
into a much darker and more interesting storyline
when Michele discovers a dead body in an abandoned
well.
Michele has a marvelous imagination
and when he begins to image that the dead body is
alive, we are taken into a magical yet somehow dark
world of youth and creativity where we soon begin
to question for ourselves exactly what is real and
what is not.
But since this is ultimately a coming-of-age
story, truth and reality must win out over fantasy.
While the film could become an interesting and creepy
treatise on a child's mind and their creative spirit,
it instead become an essay on the end of innocence
and the struggle for understanding the world that
plagues us all as we grow up. Michele has to face
harsh realities in his life yet he is only beginning
to barely understand and question life at all. Better
than a coming-of- age story, "I'm not Scared" becomes
a coming-of-wisdom and a coming-of-conscience story.
Set in 1978, the film overflows
with the innocence of childhood. A huge field of wheat
(evoking the American ideal of amber waves of grain
- freedom and summertime) serves as child's playground
here. Not fully grown, the boys and girls running
through this field seem to us as wonderfully free
as might be possible in the world. But the field,
with its height as tall as the children's stature,
also seems a scary maze of claustrophobia and unforeseen
terror. Director Gabriele Salvatores uses a wonderful
visual device of allowing odd animal and insect creatures
to rove through the film as it goes along, giving
it a sense of purity and naturalism but also one of
fright and creepy weirdness. This setting, coupled
with the film seeming steeped in the classic Italian
Neo-Realism style, evokes purity and reality while
also expressing Michele's emerging world view. By
the end of the film, the harvesters have come to the
field and Michele has begun to grow taller, able to
see the harsh reality of the world outside his once
isolated playground.
The score by Ezio Bosso and Pepo
Scherman is perfect accompaniment to the films ever
increasingly frightening images and ideas. Reminiscent
of Philip Glass and Elmer Bernstien, the music, like
the film, evokes imagination and harsh reality at
the same time. The score, visual images and story
continually draw us deeper and deeper into what is
happening to Michele here. It is wonderful.
The film stumbles just a tad when
it segues from the fantastical playland that is Michele's
imagination into the harsh reality of the inhumanity
of man. But this is mainly because Salvatores is so
adept at creating a magical fantasy world inside a
child's mind that we simply do not desire to see it
crushed by the impending reality of young adulthood.
But such a evolution inevitably comes and we are stabbed,
like a knife into skin, into this world of bad men
and the evil that they do. It only takes us a moment
to adjust to reality, as we adult viewers have become
accustomed to doing, and to see that Salvatores is
equally adept at presenting this emerging world. Stuck
into the reality, we are nonetheless still engrossed
in Michele and what is happening to him.
This is a marvellous world, one
that evolves from childhood to adult, from fantasy
to reality, from innocence to ethical. At its final
moment, although crushed, injured and saddened, we,
like Michele, are nevertheless cleansed and whole
and pure once again. Only a child would have the audacity
to proclaim, "I'm Not Scared." Michele learns here
that in the real world, there is indeed much to be
weary of. But he also learns that he can triumph over
the worst of it with sincerity, heart and truth.
Note:
In Italian with subtitles.
Written by Niccolo Ammaniti, based
on his novel.
The film was nominated for several
awards and won many.
Released in Italy in 2003. The film
debuted in the U.S. at Telluride in 2003 and made
its way to American arthouses in April of 2004.
Viewed at a press sneak at thew
Arbor in May of 2004.
