Dino Buzzati imagined the border in ‘The desert of the Tatars‘ like that inhospitable place waiting always postponed for the arrival of others. And in the void of infinite delay there remained the perfect image of almost everything absurd. One step further, JM Coetzee constructed the tight metaphor of the different that terrifies us in ‘Waiting for the barbarians’. The nomads were, by their simple condition as foreigners, the pretext for a threat that ended up being self-destruction. And so. The most strange and by definition foreign can be the most personal and personal. Immigration in Western ideology is inextricably linked to the metaphor of barbarians. That is the story and its denunciation necessarily leads us to reformulate and redefine issues such as exclusion, fear or, in a hurry, the very meaning of the other; otherness, as the classics would say.
‘I captain’, the new work by Matteo Garrone, his first film shot outside of Italy, proposes turning the common imagination on its head, the most classic one, which insists on the fear of the different and the poor. And he does it, and this is his great discovery, from also the most classic of stories: ‘The odyssey’, which is still the story of an emigrant. Suddenly, the man from another world approaches and as his features become more defined and clear, his face is just a mirror. He is us. As it is.
We follow the steps from Dakar to Sicily of two friends (Moustapha Fall and Seydou Sarr) who, from our perspective as attentive viewers of other people’s catastrophes, are also two barbarians. Their path will take them to face all types of monsters: There are giants like Polyphemus, and cruel forgetfuls like the lotus-eaters, and Laestrygonians who eat human flesh, and sorceresses as lethal as Circe, and charming sirens who hide death, and even creatures more lethal than Scylla and Charybdis. That is to say, there are traffickers of human beings, and exploiters of the desperate, and swindlers, and murderers, and an entire Europe that, in its confusion, no longer knows exactly who it is (like the lotus-eaters) from before.
In truth, and this is the key and the meaning, they are nothing more than new versions, exactly as heroic and overwhelmed, of Ulysses, just waiting to reach a place they can call home. They are, again, us. Garrone uses the deeply empathetic, almost subjective grammar of his already classic workGomorrah‘ without giving up that effort to recompose the deep mechanics of the usual stories that organized films like ‘The tale of tales’, ‘Dogman‘ o ‘Pinocchio‘.
All ‘I captain‘is lived and experienced in the retina as an adventure film rather than an existential tragedy or a drama dedicated to denunciation. Of course there is a lot of unbridled drama and even more of a political manifesto against brutality, but what keeps the film standing, and even suspended over the viewer’s imagination, is its vocation to make despair, sorrow and, when the time comes, coincide. case, joy of the protagonists with their own. In fact, the entire film, which flees miserabilism at all times and runs through distant landscapes and exotic deserts, is stitched together as it progresses with the most intimate, with any dreamed story. And so on until achieving, in a way that is as brilliant as it is emotional, that what is outside is also what is inside; and they, us.