A Chiara

A 15-year-old girl living in Calabria, Italy, is suddenly abandoned by her father. Soon, she begins to understand the reasons why he left and starts to realise that she too will probably have to abandon her life as well.

A Chiara is an Italian film about a teenage girl from a tight-knit and very obviously insular family, whose father disappears one day, the same day that cops start to appear at their door and criminals with fire bombs begin tohaunt their streets. When no one will explain to her what is going on, her hunt for answers leads to dark family secrets, and forces her to make a decision about the course of her own future.

Other than this film, of course, I’m not at all familiar with the work of Writer/director Jonas Carpognano, but apparently his process on this particular film was that he cast a lot of members of the Rotolo family, a clan with “alleged” connections of the Sicilian Mafia, all of whom reside in the film’s setting of Gioia Tauro. In typical fashion when using non-professional actors inhabiting a story that very closely resembles their own lives, Carpognano basically kept the family members in the dark, and just had them react how they would naturally in many of their scenes.

Normally, I believe that movies that rely heavily on improvised scenes/scripts is the recourse of lazy hacks and art school rejects. It’s something that you often see young creators do, mostly because they’re coincidentally cushioned from failure by a pile of inherited wealth, so they’re used to empty flourishes and half efforts, and have been brought up with the belief that things will just work out, that magic will just happen, because that’s usually how it goes for them, so roll film…

It’s usually god damn tedious and redefines the term “self-indulgent.”

That having been said, to Carpognano’s credit, the magic actually shows up here, resulting in a more natural feel in general. It’s a real-deal Holyfield White Buffalo, people. Although, to be fair, this is mostly due to the fact that the improvised scenes call for most of the native Italian non-professional actors to do a lot of loud Italian-sounding gesture-heavy background chatter conversation during wine and food fueled family parties, so y’know…

He was rolling the dice with some weighted die, right?

Anyway… In the end, A Chiara is a good film. It’s a small and surprisingly emotionally, surprisingly complex little drama, one that, while it may feature a young girl’s life and family that are perhaps a bit odd for most people, it involves a very relatable moment in everyone’s life, the point where a child first realizes who their parents really are, and starts to consider what that means for the course of their own life.