A Chiara (Jonas Carpignano, 2021) (Patreon)

If you are a filmmaker or group of filmmakers -- let's say, the Dardennes brothers -- the desire to combine a rough cinematic realism with contemporary sociopolitical problems is understandable. It allows one to employ techniques (close-ups, handheld camerawork, the intense observation of a restless main character) that convey urgency. Or at least that's how we have customarily learned to read these techniques. So by applying that approach to the complex issues of a changing world, a filmmaker at least seems to be exploring subject matter appropriate to the unsteady (but highly controlled) form.

But what happens when, for decades, the main tenets of social reality don't appear to change? In A Chiara, the latest film from Jonas Carpignano, we are thrown into a loving, rowdy family, and eventually something goes awry. Trouble is, if one has seen Carpignano's previous features A Ciambra and Mediterranea, or really any significant subset of Italian cinema, there will be very little mystery as to what's going on with this Calabrian clan. In other words, the dominant "problem" in Italian society -- its complete imbrication with organized crime -- never really evolves. So all Carpignano is able to offer us is yet another fragmented perspective of that dominant trope.

The film opens on the lavish 18th birthday party of Giulia (Grecia Rotolo). She's the oldest od three daughters, in a family run with quiet authority by patriarch Claudio (Claudio Rotolo). But the focus of the film, per its title, is the middle daughter, Chiara (Sawmy Rotolo). She loves her family, but all of a sudden her dad goes missing and is announced in the news media as a fugitive. Chiara's attempts to glean information from Giulia, her mom (Carmela Fumo), and various aunts and uncles, come to nothing. They all basically tell Chiari the same thing: you're too young to understand. But of course, through dogged persistence, Chiara pieces it all together. Claudio is a middleman, wholesaling cocaine for local Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta.

At the halfway point of A Chiara, the girl strongarms an uncle into taking her to Claudio's hiding place. She confronts him, and instead of sending her away, Claudio decides to take Chiara on a drug-prep errand, letting her see the Family Business in action. ("We just made $35,000. And we worked for an hour.") But following this moment of father-daughter bonding, a social worker at Chiara's school to confront her about a violent act she'd committed earlier. Assuming that this acting-out is a result of her criminal environment, an anti-Mafia welfare bureau decides to pluck Chiara from her home and place her in foster care.

And the negotiation of that governmental stumbling block comprises the entire second half of A Chiara. This is not a problem in itself. But the first half of the film went full-throttle in its suggestion that Chiara is fundamentally betrayed by learning that she was born into a crime family. However, immediately upon being offered / threatened with the chance of a new start, she clings to the only family she's ever known. Carpignano doesn't really display the conflicting attitudes we'd expect to see from Chiara. Instead, it's as if she completely switches gears, accepting the ‘Ndrangheta and her future place within it once she's been let in on the family secret.

This has the retroactive affect of challenging, if not cancelling, our identification with Chiara's moral dilemma. As a plot structure, it plays quite mechanistically. And, while Carpignano seems to want us to consider the dubious ethics of organized crime, Chiara's sudden change of heart largely eradicates that moral gray area. Instead, we are left with the sense that in Italy, the Mafia is just how things are, and there's virtually no point contesting or even questioning it. To me, this just clarifies the basic futility of A Chiara as an intellectual project.