Screen
Alleva, Richard
a victory for no one. 6221 may have been a voyage of dis- binieri are charged with escorting the children to an orphanage covery for its author, as the program note suggests, but...
...The remainder of the film shows how the young Open Doors, with its beautifully autumnal cine- soldier enacts his good intentions and how the kids respond to matography and the great performance of Gian the treatment...
...This hubbub isn't that of friends greetterizations by seasoned players...
...And, amid all that noise, who can attune virtuoso acting...
...Jorge Luis Borges: The Circular Ruins Amelio is quite as capable of making a scene work through powerful imagery as by focusing on faces...
...But that makes it all the more gratifying when the ice is fi- "He wanted to dream a man...
...At first there is nothing but muted hostility between the children and their guard, but Criaco's impatience is undermined by his humanity...
...I can't wait to see Stolen Children a sec- little Buddha nestled in the dark middle, ond time so that I can skip the subtitles altogether...
...I use the Riesman phrase deliberand this isn't just a case of aesthetic restlessness...
...having captured a thief who dreamed a man while sightseeing with the kids, isn't praised but blamed by a I dreamed an ear and woke to hear Creation superior for having dallied during his assignment...
...You did as echoing in my own circular ruins...
...Second, Stolen Children place where you are always in public, and the public forms a has been made in a completely different style from Open Doors singularly "lonely crowd...
...Scalici and leracitano are, by contrast, as When Borges Dreamed maddeningly opaque as the kids you often meet in real life...
...He was seekI don't mean to give the impression that Stolen Children is ing a soul worthy of participating in the universe...
...Two cara- an adult male in an intimate setting...
...all sound and no sound...
...6221 may have been a voyage of dis- binieri are charged with escorting the children to an orphanage covery for its author, as the program note suggests, but what in Civitavecchia, but one of them skips off to visit a girlfriend...
...Criaco's character, all of whose virtues apparently come from Tympanic membrane next, his good clean peasant upbringing...
...And yet he is the one accused of being a sort of no idea whether the child actors, Valentina Scalici and kidnapper...
...a crypto-documentary or even a belated bloom of neorealism...
...I have to conscience...
...Why even try...
...minute entirety and impose him on reality...
...This hurts any movie in which the talk is not as in a place where nothing lives...
...he found was fashioned for the audience into a lament and a The other officer, Criaco, scarcely more than a boy himself, warning...
...There is also an impediment to enjoyment that is not Amelio's Wanting to hear continental shiftings, fault but is inherent in any naturalistic film in a foreign lan- the moon's ancient whir, guage...
...There is a moment on a When Borges dreamed beach when the girl watches Criaco teaching her brother to swim the man who dreamed a man that is visualized so powerfully as a mythic moment, with the I went to bed and dreamed an ear: soldier seen as a sort of man-porpoise on whose back the boy wanting to hear more stories, rides, that I won't soon forget it...
...The lassitude that the kids feel in the early from auricle to cochlea, semicircular part of their journey is well conveyed but sometimes threat- canals winding blindly through ens to topple the movie into boredom...
...important as the silences within talk or as the failure of talk to occur...
...The noise is coming mostly from machines...
...How could they be, given the state of shock the kids are in...
...And he's used the faces of his young actors as emotional full force...
...sysand untheatrical tempos that may try the patience of some view- tems, train whistles, car and train engines are all performing at ers...
...iota of melodrama, Amelio has given it a less designed look Car radios, portable cassette players, television sets, P.A...
...Amelio's latest, enough, never even attempts to jerk tears...
...First, this fine movie to the south, the director presents an Italy that we have never is further proof that Amelio is a tough-minded humanist who seen or heard before in either Italian films or in American movies asks disturbing questions about the sometimes monstrous in- about Italy...
...Maria Volante, helped make it the finest film re- It is a heartwarming scenario yet the film, though poignant leased in this country in 1991...
...GERALD WEALES but intelligent and honorable, takes the kids to the state home only to learn that its officials don't want a former prostitute on SCREEN the premises even though she's only eleven years old and no willing collaborator in her own corruption...
...No wonder the passers-by are mute...
...Open Doors ately because Italy, always portrayed in earlier movies as chaotwas basically a political thriller and required a solid plot, sus- ic but convivial, has, in Amelio's vision, become singularly penseful rhythms, menace-laden dialogue, and juicy charac- American in its noisiness...
...It isn't even like that of the revelers and paparazzi and misshaped by their environments and doesn't contain an in La Dolce Vita...
...Criaco...
...Shunned are the craftily placed pause, the significant inflection, the poignant diminuendo at the end of a sentence--all the cunning processing of emotion that both good and bad child ac- Kit Thompson tors give you...
...But since Stolen Children is a ing each other in cafes or merchants extolling their wares in a nearly plotless account of the fate of three innocents shaped public market...
...he wanted to dream him in nally broken and their emotions do finally flow...
...In a movie in which all evil occurs because people do as they like or do as they feel they must Commonweal 7 May 1993: 21...
...These confrontations are the core of this film and they are also the scenes that will divide any audience into those who are ready for Stolen Children and those who will find it a bore...
...the most profoundly silent forest A more serious flaw is the rather sentimental conception of of cilia-I nurtured them from root to tip...
...Pail of the greatness of Open stretched taut and ready to listen Doors resided in the complexity of its hero, the magistrate I dreamed and dreamed DiFrancesco, whose character encompassed cantankerous- the tiny porous wafer...
...Who could commaps to be read by the camera rather than as instruments of pete...
...11 Ladro di Bambini, The Thief of Children is the Giuseppe Icracitano, are professional players or simply cast original title of the movie...
...Amelio has set himStolen Children, isn't on the same artistic plane but it sustains self a harsher task...
...He knows that these children have been robbed of their childhood and he determines to restore a piece The rich but subtle theatricality of Gianni Amelio's of it to them...
...In fact, there are moments in significantly, in Milan, the latest hotbed of Italy's seemingly this movie when you feel that the most merciful thing that could unstanchable political corruption...
...The film begins, aren't discomfited by the racket...
...And though another director might have been tempted to jolly things along with scenes of easy pathos 20: 7 May 1993 Commonweal calculated to make the viewer's eyes mist, this is not Amelio's to get by, in which an entire society seems to be (in Robert Lowell's way...
...As the children are driven, by train and car, my admiration for its creator in two ways...
...A woman is hustled off to happen to the girl, in light of her frightening past, would be to prison and her children made wards of the state because the live in a noisy public place forever and never again have to face mother has prostituted her eleven-year-old daughter...
...ness, compassion, tenderness, and cynicism without strain...
...you liked," the officer charges...
...their ears to the few mumbled words of a couple of kids who The story is an odyssey from north to south, from Milan to have been stunned into near-silence by the unspeakable crimes Sicily, from utter despair to a sort of truce with life that teeters committed in the locked rooms of their own home...
...He makes the viewer work hard to see the brief flickers phrase) sliding by on grease, Criaco alone has acted according of emotion that the soldier evokes from the children...
...It is an insanely new, impersonal, noisy country, a teraction of society and the individual...
...Yet it is the dialogue in the penultimate scene that crystalizes When Borges dreamed the man the tragic theme of the movie...
...Significantly, these places are either above ground (on the rooftops of inns, the terraces of hotels) or apart from the city (the beach...
...But, on the whole, Amelio low voices in dark hallways, holds fast to the hard surface of things: concrete buildings and the murmurings of ghosts, all secrets...
...it never does, though...
...Subtitles call our attention to the dialogue, emphasize the night wind, edging timberline it, italicize it...
...He does, miraculously, find places where he and the kids can face and hear each other...
...stony faces...
...Since the children are Sicilian, they are reassigned to a Sicilian orphanage and TRUST A COP Criaco disgustedly accepts the prolongation of his wretched asAMELIO'S 'STOLEN CHILDREN' signment...
...The kids on hopelessness without quite falling into it...
...For Amelio's camera attends, waits upon, the children's responses as patiently as Criaco does, and these responses aren't quick in coming...
...Enrico Lo Verso is exactly right as Criaco, but at a certain point Wanting to hear stories children tell fairly early in the film, we realize that the young officer isn't alone, at night, of heaven and hell, going to surprise us, and we need a hero with more layers to wanting to hear my mother's voice his nature to be fully held by a story that depends as much on from across the world, static-free character as Stolen Children does...
...But the adult male who has temporary charge of her is determined not to let her sink into such despair...
...But Amelio presents society itself to type, but in any event they are used as the neorealists of as the real ` ladro," the thief of childhood, the bureaucratic grinde the forties and fifties used nonprofessionals: the pressure of of young humanity...
...We should keep our eyes on the faces where so much Hammer, anvil, stirrup and drama is being expressed but we can't resist the downward tug at labyrinthic end, the drum of the printed words...
...and full of explanation...
...RICHARD ALLFVA the situation is applied as directly as possible on the performer with the camera close enough to catch the reaction...
...The small and few faults of this movie are mostly the flip Dreaming, spiraling cell by cell sides of its merit...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 9
