Review of the film “I am Captain” by Matteo Garrone

Matteo Garrone’s I Am Captain, about African refugees besieging Europe, is being released. Its difference from dozens of similar films on a hot topic Andrey Plakhov sees it in the director’s approach and style.

Sixteen-year-old Senegalese Seydou (Seydou Starr) did not have such a bad life in Dakar: he loved hanging around his hometown, and in the evenings singing and dancing with his still young mother to the fiery tom-tom. But one fine day, together with his cousin Moussa (Mustafa Fall), the guy rushes to Italy – through the scorching Sahara desert, tortured Libyan prisons and the raging elements of the Mediterranean Sea.

The cousins, having watched enough on YouTube about the lives of pop stars, decided: why are we worse? We will bask in luxury, help our relatives, and white Europeans will pray for us. The film makes it clear that often African youth flee to Europe not because of wars and poverty, but are seduced by available sources of information. This is, so to speak, a sociological aspect, but Garrone does not dwell on it for long. Rather, the main part of the film is reminiscent of classic stories with the flavor of youthful romance about teenagers running away from home – adjusted for the era of the Internet and mobile phones.

However, the further you go, the more obvious the frivolous adventure turns from a semi-fairy-tale odyssey into a fateful test. The peak is the climactic episode, in which the young hero, who does not even know how to swim, must guide a rusty seaworthy vessel across the sea, filled to overflowing with unfortunate migrants – the sick, the elderly and women on the verge of giving birth.

There was another Italian film, “Sea on Fire” by Gianfranco Rosi, about the migration crisis on the island of Lampedusa. Problematic documentary dominated there, but Garrone was not into this area. Even relying on a fact, he instantly transforms it with his wild directorial imagination. In the film, “The Taxidermist” takes the plot of a criminal chronicle as a basis and plays out the most extravagant love triangle imaginable: a waiter with a model appearance, a dwarf taxidermist who uses corpses for drug trafficking, and an ordinary beauty who stands in the way of their happiness.

Then “Gomorrah” appeared – an anthropological study, an analysis of organized crime as a mode of behavior and a way of life. Taking on the film adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s documentary book about the Neapolitan Camorra, the director turned this hot material into a cold epic without social rhetoric and clichés.

Garrone acts in a similar way in the new film. He was inspired by the story of the Ivorian Mamadou, but he was just fleeing famine and civil war. And Garrone knew that the first thing he would be reproached for was appropriating someone else’s fate and suffering. And he made the movie in his own way, going far from the original fact. This director knows how to limit himself both in showing the horrors of migrant wanderings and in whipping up sentimental feelings. At some point, when the violence threatens to go off scale, he switches the atmospheric key, and what is happening again begins to seem like a fairy tale, fortunately Garrone, who filmed “Pinocchio” and the scary tales of Giambattista Basile, is also strong in this genre.

Throughout their journey, Moussa and Seydoux are accompanied by extraterrestrial forces, visions and dreams. These include the spirits of their ancestors protecting the young fugitives, a flying woman, and other attributes of magical realism borrowed from African fairy tales. At the same time, “I Am Captain” is a modern movie with drive and special effects, a road movie with superheroes into which naive boys gradually turn.

Perhaps the most risky thing is that for artistic balance the director uses decorative aesthetics with a touch of mannerism and even glamor. But in the end, this plays into the film’s hands: the designer frames provide the necessary defamiliarizing effect, preventing it from getting bogged down in either naturalism or sweetness.

Along the way, Garrone solves, apparently, the most difficult task for himself – while maintaining his author’s style (a complex mix of neorealism, modernism and postmodernism), without losing emotion, without drowning it in aesthetics. The director has always been attracted to perfectionist heroes. One such hero, a jewelry sculptor from the film “First Love,” starves his girlfriend, who is freed from mortal flesh and turns into a skeleton. Her body becomes the material for an ideal installation: all that remains is to be gilded and put on public display.

Seydoux, although he doesn’t know the word, is also a perfectionist. Only he solves not far-fetched decadent problems, but the most pressing ones. Storming a stormy sea, he, being responsible for the lives of dozens of desperate people, makes an unexpected discovery about himself: “I am a captain!” And looking at the finale into the face of Seydoux Starr, filled with experience, we see not just an authentic black boy whom the director took for the role, but a real artist.

Garrone himself is a perfectionist. He admits that he was afraid of travel, did not like to fly and suffered from seasickness. But, having taken on this complex film, he began to do something that he thought he would never dare to do. And he took it off. Because I felt something like a mission or calling.