Fuocoammare
Gianfranco Rosi (2016)
Luchino Visconti’s film The Leopard (1963) is based on the novel of the same name by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The protagonist of The Leopard is the representative of a moribund aristocracy in Sicily; the man who wrote the book was himself the last prince of Lampedusa, the Sicilian province that is also the largest of the Italian Pelagie islands. Until a few years ago, Lampedusa always connoted, for me and I guess for many people, the writer who inspired Visconti’s movie but the place Lampedusa, by featuring repeatedly on television news, has now changed the word’s primary significance. Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Fire at Sea, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, reinforces this new meaning of Lampedusa. Since the start of this century, it has been a primary entry point to Europe for migrants from Africa and the Middle East. In October 2013, an estimated four hundred migrants died in two shipwrecks, which occurred within a few days of each other, off the island’s coast. Over the years, many more have drowned or died as a result of burns or poisoning by fumes from the diesel used en route to refuel the craft on which they travel so precariously.
Presenting Gianfranco Rosi with the Golden Bear, Meryl Streep, as chair of the Berlin jury, described Fire at Sea as ‘a daring hybrid of captured footage and deliberate storytelling that allows us to consider what documentary can do’. This is right enough. After brief scene-setting legends on the screen, Rosi deploys no voiceover commentary or other obvious mechanism of audience manipulation. He alternates description of the migrants’ plight and of the lives of a handful of islanders – a twelve-year-old boy from a fishing family, his father and grandmother, a school friend, an elderly married couple, a middle-aged doctor who treats migrants as well as the locals. ‘Alternates’ is the word: with the notable exception of the doctor, Pietro Bartolo, the two sets of people in the film don’t overlap much. Members of the Italian coast guard are in evidence, of course, but not individualised – their faces are virtually invisible behind the masks that put the finishing touch to their white coveralls.
In terms of screen time in Fire at Sea, the migrants occupy a supporting role. In terms of impact, of course, they dominate – as human beings and, no less troublingly, as cinematic images which simultaneously degrade and emphasise their humanity. The shiny safety blankets draping newly-arrived migrants suggest a nightmarish gift wrap. The serried unconscious bodies unloaded from boats – perhaps alive, perhaps not – bring to mind a terrible catch of fish. A Nigerian man speak-sings an account of the ordeal and survival of himself and his companions, who shout endorsement of his rhythmical words. (He is like an extraordinary rapper with a gospel church backing group.) Late on in the film, a succession of women’s faces is more quietly and gravely eloquent. As in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, you’re reminded, where you don’t expect it, of the global ubiquity of soccer – and of sporting partisanship too: the migrants have a game of football that’s essentially impromptu but with the teams organised strictly according to nationality.
The passages that show the continuing lives of the Lampedusa natives include some fine pieces of ‘pure’ documentary description – such as the morning ritual of a woman making her and her husband’s double bed, saying her prayers, kissing the religious statuettes and the family photograph at the bedside. The ‘deliberate storytelling’ to which Meryl Streep referred is most evident in the sequences featuring the young boy Samuele Pucillo. He’s a remarkable subject although there were times – for example, when he’s sucking the sauce from his spaghetti as noisily as possible – when I wondered if he’d grown a bit too aware of Gianfranco Rosi’s camera. (The director is also the cinematographer.) Samuele has various ailments and insecurities – a lazy eye, anxiety attacks, difficulty in manoeuvring the oars of a rowing boat. These are all presumably real. But they seem designed also as metaphorical indicators of the larger anxieties of a place – Sicily, Italy, Europe – faced with a migrant crisis that it can’t manage, let alone solve.
16 June 2016
