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Cinema Categories Boston-Area Theaters Featuring Italian and Italian-American Films |
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Film
Review I eagerly urge my membership, the broader American community and beyond to support Ciao America!, an independent film by two FIERI members, Frank and Joseph Ciota. The film is beautifully-rendered, portraying Italy and Italian Americans in a refreshingly dignified light. Joseph, the writer and Frank, the director admirably risk introducing a new genre of Italian American filmmaking. Purposely mixing metaphors, I must say that if the criteria for clever innovation is providing a fascinatingly positive and lingering view of Italian themes and characters, this movie soars with flying colors. At the same time, the film does not come across as a 'how to make a positive image workshop.' It's genuine. It's real. The story is seamless and the acting effortless. The protagonist, Lorenzo Primavera (played by Eddie Malavarca) is driven to become a "somebody" by his late grandfather, also named Lorenzo Primavera (played by Antonio Navarro), and his somewhat detached father, Antonio Primavera (played by Paul Sorvino). The young Lorenzo is a recent college graduate, reflective and articulate, with an attractively tempered urban accent. The character is an example of education and American urban ethnicity integrated perfectly. A representation of modern Italian American youth, Lorenzo is a welcome contrast to the wise-guy wannabe that pervades conventional Hollywood films. The young Lorenzo returns to Italy to understand his heritage. Meanwhile, he considers whether to search out the reason why his grandfather (who was also his mentor and role model) never returned to the homeland he left behind in 1933. (Symbolically, the grandfather, whose voice occasionally narrates his own story, departed for America the year of Hitler's dreadful and FDR's hopeful accessions. The film is set mostly in Ferrara, Italy but also includes breathtaking scenes of Florence and a brief, but peacefully quaint visit to the town in Avellino that Lorenzo's grandfather abandoned. The film sprinkles overt and subliminal tributes to Italy's beauty and accomplishments, from the unusual claim that American football was invented in Florence to invocations of love juxtaposed against Leonardo's art, Ferrara's architecture, and Florence's landscape. The grandson tries to support himself by coaching a less-than-amateur team that plays American football, but whose players show their conventional preference for soccer during practice and occasionally during a game. This subplot is the source of rich, cleverly interspersed comic relief. It is as instructive as it is funny, such as when the Italian National Anthem is sung while the star from the opposing team is drafted and carted off to the army during a game. The buffoon of the film is the imported American player. Skip Cromwell (played by Nathaniel Maston), while having a trace of the Italian-stereotype wannabe, turns out to be the generic prototype of what Americans themselves call the "ugly American." He is an intrusively conspicuous philistine who bastardizes and blasphemies a culture he self-righteously presumes to understand. The name "Cromwell" also befits his excessively authoritarian coaching style. (Any relation to Oliver?) The film includes contemporary Italian music and celebrations of Carnevale, showing young people honoring traditions while defining and engaging in their own youth culture and styles. In this milieu, the protagonist falls in love at first sight and the audience encounters a moving love story with powerful chemistry, as well as a sexually delightful cooking scene. The target of his affection, Paola Angelini (played by actress Violante Placido), epitomizes contemporary women in Italy. She seeks the identity and independence that comes with education. Meanwhile she comports herself with stunningly natural concepts of beauty and a respect for family, cultural traditions, and local customs. Ironically Placido is the real life daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli who played Apollonia in the landmark film "The Godfather" in which she represented for Americans the classic ideal of nostalgic Italian beauty. At a wedding during Pasquetta (a holiday the day after Easter, unfamiliar to Lorenzo and most Americans) Lorenzo meets his girlfriend's parents. There, Lorenzo tries to keep up with the number of wine shots consumed by the father, who interjects--- between shots-- his notions of family values, time-honored traditions, security, and love for his daughter. Antonio Primavera, an endearing gold-chained fossil reminiscent of another era in demeanor and mannerisms, is confrontational, yet sympathetic and loving towards his son. Ironically, Sorvino's character is the Italian ethnic who felt the need to identify only with America while living out an ostentatiously Americanized notion of Italian ethnicity, partly manufactured yet partly self-made, self-induced, self-imposed, and self-reinforced. He looked at Italy as a country you leave and "Italian" as an identity you leave behind. At best, he saw the "Old Country" as a digression from the reality of daily life in America and a diversion from a natural progression that comes from making one's home in America. He saw no value in his son staying there. Yet Antonio himself has been to Italy, kept his Italian-sounding name, and apparently honored his own father (and tradition) by naming his son Lorenzo, not Lawrence. Antonio was even willing to pay to send his own father back there to reconnect with the past and find closure with the reasons he left. Maybe Antonio himself would have felt a calm sense of completion had his father gone back to visit Italy before he died? Maybe it's why he doesn't object to Lorenzo going in the place of his grandfather? It also explains why Antonio doesn't interfere when the son must decide whether to remain. Antonio's perspective was a paradox and a 'reverse paradox,' if you could call it that! Antonio's tired image defers and gives way to a new generation with a fresh, contemporary image assimilating more modern American and Italian identities with unique aspirations that don't presume a fast-paced, fast-tracked, money-making career. The young Lorenzo's émigré Italian American cousin in Italy, Frank Mantovani, (played by Anthony De Sando) is a concrete and real-time example and advocate of this alternative lifestyle. Even so, it is refreshing to see a movie where grandfather had professional aspirations in law and medicine for the father and the father for the son. It was a uniquely subtle point that challenges assumptions and depictions of Italian Americans. World-renown actor, Giancarlo Gianinni plays Felice, the protagonist's granduncle (his grandfather Lorenzo's brother-in-law), who leads the young Lorenzo through the grandfather's small town in Avellino. Gianinni's character is a metaphorical Virgil escorting the young Lorenzo as Dante through what "Just Do It Americans" would consider Purgatory---complaisant complacency without opportunity. Purgatorio is an appropriate metaphor since Lorenzo must find catharsis for himself and his grandfather by reconciling with the past. Felice is his guide, figuratively and literally walking Lorenzo through the history, complete with sites and family artifacts. Here is the film's most wonderfully ironic twist: the protoganist goes to Italy as a proxy for his grandfather, who seeks inner peace posthumously. The grandson almost achieves his spiritual objective by discovering the dilemma his grandfather faced that led him to forsake his hometown. Before going to Italy, the grandson assumed he must compensate for his grandfather's regrets, mistakes, and failures by working hard in the United States to become a socio-economic success. Now in Italy, he learns his grandfather was also intensely remorseful on matters of the heart. On the train back to Ferrara, Lorenzo unseals and unwraps the envelope his granduncle has given him. It contains the momento mori that brings Lorenzo (and any audience with a soul) to a profoundly tearful ablution. Abruptly, the grandson finds himself confronting a modern-day version of his grandfather's dilemma. (Although subtle and understated in one scene, the protagonist's girlfriend is faced with a similar choice as Lorenzo's grandmother.) Going to America for opportunity or remaining in Italy for love could each amount to the same wrong, no-win decision the grandfather had to make. Having returned to Italy, Lorenzo Primavera is challenged to weigh the bad-luck and fatalism of his grandfather's culture (that also pervades the Italian football team with more levity), against the optimistically hopeful American mantra contending "We make our own breaks." While Lorenzo Primavera believes the mantra as an American, he still harbors his grandfather's 1933-transplanted-mindset of pessimism and failure because the elder Lorenzo's "luck ran out" while struggling in America. Lorenzo Primavera feels a tension over whether to believe we actually 'make our own breaks' or passively succeed from good or bad luck. This is the somberly cerebral undertone cutting across the film's various subplots. The title of the film itself is an upbeat catchphrase for the protagonist's heart-wrenching dilemma. The dual meaning of "ciao" in the title captures the protagonist's choice: to affectionately return to America or bid it a fond farewell, as a young man in love leaves his roots there to reconnect with the deeper soil and soul where it all began. In either case, "Ciao" as hello or goodbye is an "Ode to America" (to a land of opportunity), which at one point made Italy something to leave and now something to return to. Whereas "being American" meant doing American things to Antonio Primavera, to his son, it means having the freedom to choose one's own destiny and where and how to live out one's future. As America lured the emigrant away from a nation of origin to provide equality of opportunity, the nation of origin now instructs that wealth is not everything. This is illustrated when one of the football players, Alesandro Guio (played by Pier Paolo LoVino) dismissively accuses Lorenzo of pretending to understand why contemporary Italians would not leave the beauty of their homeland now to seek opportunity in the United States. It is among the last challenges to Lorenzo's mindset before he makes the final decision to stay or go. Ultimately, Lorenzo and his girlfriend each make their decision autonomously. Intentionally ambiguous to goad future viewers to see the movie and find out the ending, I simply say, the audience accepts and embraces the decision Lorenzo ultimately makes. The filmmakers should also be applauded for the way the decision is revealed and the scene is rendered to the audience-- during Florence's medieval festival and tournament that strengthens the notion of American football's flukish origin in that city. All of the film's elements exemplify much of the brilliance of the movie. It's sophisticated yet earthy and humanistic, capturing what being Italian is really all about. FIERI is an international organization of students and young professionals that strives to preserve Italian culture, foster networking opportunities, encourage higher education through scholarships and mentoring, and promote positive images of the Italian heritage. |
Italian-American
Cinema 
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