Hope and fantasy coexist so intently in Io Capitano, Matteo Garrone’s wrenching Oscar-nominated account of the journey of two teenage Senegalese migrants in the direction of a brand new life in Europe, that you simply begin to surprise if the movie is arguing that hope is a fantasy. Whether or not the higher future that tempts 16-year-old Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall) on to the perilous journey throughout the Sahara and the Mediterranean is not any extra substantial than the mirage of a floating girl that Seydou hallucinates within the desert. However in truth it is a movie that, for all its brutal horrors, retains a kernel of hope and religion within the inherent decency of humankind (or a few of it a minimum of).
Central to the spirit of the movie is Seydou, a gangly string bean with a smile that warms the display screen; an adolescent who continues to be sufficient of a kid to consider that manhood means by no means being afraid. It’s a stunning, delicate efficiency from Sarr. Seydou has a purity and innocence as a personality, not due to his rose-tinted naivety, however as a result of all through the journey, and at the same time as his illusions are systematically shattered, he by no means loses his selflessness and empathy for the others who share his plight. But when Seydou represents all that’s good in humanity, there isn’t a scarcity of representatives of the darker aspect of man – at one level Seydou finds himself separated from his cousin and locked in a Libyan jail run by criminals as a torture facility and extortion manufacturing unit. However Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman) balances the intense ugliness of this chapter of the story in opposition to cinematography that finds surprising magnificence all through.
