“I Am Captain” by Matteo Garrone: a cliché film about African migrants

“I Am Captain,” the story of a Senegalese youth’s journey along the notorious route of African migrants through the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea, is being released in Russia. The film by Matteo Garrone was included in the short lists of all the main film awards in the world: Oscar, and before that the film lost to the Golden Globe “Zone of Interest” Jonathan Glazer, but back in the fall Garrone was awarded at the Venice Festival. In short, it’s easy to assume that I Am Captain is a solid, quality movie on an important topic, and that’s true. There are few surprises at all in Garrone’s new film.

Text: Andrey Kartashov

When 16-year-old Seydoux, who with his cousin Musa decided to go to work in Europe, talks about this topic with his mother, she does not even want to hear about his idea. The desert and the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea are littered with the corpses of migrants who did not reach their destination, she reminds her son. He turns the conversation into a joke, but does not abandon the plan for which he and Musa have already saved up money. Soon the young men buy a bus ticket from Dakar and hit the road.

It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say that Mom was right. Having heard teenagers talk about how the aspiring musician Seydoux will become a star in Europe, any viewer will guess why the director emphasizes the naivety of the characters so much: so that at the end of the story there will be no trace of this naivety left. Garrone already did this in his most successful film “Gomorrah” – also stories of growing up, where two Italian teenagers first think that mafiosi are like romantic heroes of Hollywood movies, and then they find out that in reality they are like bruised, flabby men without conscience and principles. Likewise, I Am Captain is a story of gradually realizing the harsh truth about how the world works. Already in the first scenes one can roughly imagine what kind of tests await the young man and in what direction his character will develop; “I Am Captain” is not one of those films that deceives the audience’s expectations, so there will be challenges and there will be development.

It must be said that Garrone does not exaggerate and does not show more violence and suffering than is necessary for the plot. The Seydoux family, of course, lives poorly – at least by the standards of Western viewers for whom the film was made – but they do not starve and Garrone does not emphasize everyday difficulties. The desire of Seydoux and Musa to go to Europe to earn money is not forced: here is rather a story in the spirit of Chekhov’s story “Boys” about high school students who decide to run away to America. In this way, Garrone avoids the temptation of so-called poverty porn, which white directors rarely resist in Third World stories.

Garrone is too technical a director to need crude techniques. He already knows how to get the right reactions from the audience at the right time. One reviewer of the film calls the story an “odyssey,” but its three dramatic acts come not from Homer (Odysseus tried to get home, and not vice versa) or even from Aristotle, but from Hollywood. Garrone has remarkably mastered the international language of “effective storytelling” – hence the favor of the Oscars and the Golden Globes, where clarity of presentation and high professionalism are valued.

Here is the first dramatic moment of the film: two heroes are riding in an overcrowded back of a truck that is carrying migrants from different countries across the Sahara to a transit point. Garrone frames the scene with an alternation of helicopter panoramas of cars crossing the desert landscape and close-ups of faces. One of the passengers, unable to hold on during the shaking, falls out of the back, but the truck does not stop – there is no time: we see Seydoux’s frightened look in close-up, a reverse view from his face of the fallen man, who remains far behind in the clouds of dust, a close-up of the young man’s hand , tightly gripping the side of the truck. After this – again a general view from above. As effectively as possible, with just a few frames and without the help of words, Garrone shows a turning point – the hero realizes that he finds himself in a world where everyone is only for himself; and at the same time the director does not miss the opportunity to admire the majestic landscape.

In a similar way, one can analyze other scenes in the film, paying tribute to the way the camera crew sets the lighting in the night sequences, or the way Garrone maintains the pace through editing, especially in the climax of the film in its last half hour. And, having discussed all this, we must admit that in this extremely high-quality work there is not a single truly interesting frame, not a single non-standard plot twist and not a single interesting line. The only surprises here are the two main actors – non-professionals who play here more adventurous versions of themselves (the characters have the same names as the teenagers who played them) and put themselves into this work.

Until now, Garrone had filmed using his own material, and the texture of Italian life, history, and culture in his previous films seeped through neat cuts. On the streets of Dakar and Tripoli and in the sands of the Sahara, the director cannot discern either life, history, or culture, because he does not know these places and does not speak the language of his heroes. In the interview, Garrone claims that in preparation for the film he spoke with many people who had traveled the refugee routes of North Africa, and that such consultants were constantly present on the set. There is no reason not to believe these words. It’s clear that the writers genuinely wanted to tell an important story; it is clear that, as they say in such cases, “a lot of work has been done.” Awards and nominations have found heroes. Perhaps we will even remember this film someday, but this is not certain.

In theaters from March 28

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