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Rating: To depict Italy, Gianni Amelio, in this 1992 film written with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, tells of a journey, but not in the usual South-North direction, opting for the reverse path instead. The degraded context to move away from this time is not found in Palermo, or Naples, but in Milan. Eleven-year-old Rosetta, daughter of Sicilian immigrants, is forced by her mother into prostitution. After her mother's arrest, the Calabrian carabiniere Antonio (Enrico Lo Verso) is tasked with taking the girl and her younger asthmatic brother Luciano to a reeducation institute in Civitavecchia, from where the children are turned away and directed to another facility in Sicily. Thus begins the long journey of the three youths — because Antonio, too, is little more than a child — on the fringes of a disfigured Italy. Amelio strips away the glossy colors and all clichés to paint a bleak, defaced landscape, revealing the most desolate side of Italy in all its environmental and social decay, contrasting with the doleful beauty of the landscape as they move further South.
The film focuses on the evolution of the relationship between the youths and the carabiniere. Antonio, initially annoyed by his challenging mission, finds himself unable to handle the harshness and abrasiveness of the children's characters: Rosetta is initially hard and hostile, while Luciano is trapped in an inaccessible silence, caught between indifference, disdain for his sister, and his wounded pride because he's powerless to stop the horror at home. The carabiniere slowly gains the children's trust with small awkward gestures, sometimes brusque but disarming in their sincerity, which reveal all the modesty and respect of the character and of the director himself in addressing the dramatic history of the two children, especially with Rosetta. The film, through a language that favors what is left unsaid, subtraction, and exchanges of glances, narrates the protagonists' gradual abandonment of their hardened exterior; significant in this regard is the moment when Antonio removes his uniform at the beginning of their journey.
In the narrative, Amelio avoids all forms of sentimentality and rhetoric, but paints with rare sensitivity and delicacy the emergence of feelings of trust and affection in the two children towards Antonio, feelings that grow along with the resurgence of the childhood that had been denied to them the further they move from the place of their shame. In the second part of the film, with a slower pace that seems exhausted by the blinding southern light, there are two scenes that form the soul of the film: the long sequence of Antonio's return to his home in Calabria, and the stop at the sea in Sicily. In Calabria, Rosetta’s brief moments of serenity and innocence are once more tainted by the cruelty and violence of ignorance, embodied by Mrs. Papaleo, who humiliates her by showing her picture on the cover of a scandalous magazine, and by her husband's apathetic indifference, indicative of the corrupted mentality of a certain southern bourgeoisie.
The South portrayed by Amelio is contained in a landscape devastated by real estate speculation, in the unfinished illegal house, and in the desolate background of traffic noise facing the grandmother's garden, isolated because she no longer recognizes the world around her. Symbolically, the only one who listens to her is Luciano, precisely the one wrapped in agonizing silence for much of the film, in the tender scene where the grandmother shows him photographs of Antonio as a child. The following scene sees the three characters living out, on a beach trip, almost the realization of an impossible utopia. Antonio seems capable of returning, along with his travel companions, to the carefree days of childhood but at the same time shows all his strength in protecting Rosetta from the malignant curiosity of the self-righteous, and embodies for Luciano the figure of a father: splendid and moving is the scene where Antonio teaches the boy to swim. The hope of finally emerging from their solitude will be denied at the end of their journey by the harsh confrontation with institutional insensitivity and bureaucratic cruelty.
"The Stolen Children" is a film that connects to the tradition of neorealism (the title is indeed borrowed from "Bicycle Thieves"), focusing not so much on the events narrated or on an explicit social and political denunciation, but instead on the inner depth of the characters. Enrico Lo Verso delivers excellent sparse acting, expressing without emphasis the naivety and loneliness of a carabiniere, who is himself a victim of a world violent towards the weak, and especially the performances of the two child actors, Giuseppe Ieracitano and the extraordinary Valentina Scalici. A film that describes the environmental and moral squalor of Italy with harshness and disenchanted realism, without any attempt to sugarcoat reality and without any concession to rhetoric, yet at the same time with the ability not to revel in ugliness and to maintain a delicate and modest gaze on childhood. Despite the bitterness of the ending not allowing room for consolation, the director indeed leaves open a thread of hope in the final act of love and painful maturity, of which Rosetta, the one most deeply wounded among them, is capable.
A masterpiece, that with a sober and essential language knows how to offer moments of true poetry and beauty in depicting the wrenching humanity of the defeated.
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