Io Capitano

dir: Matteo Garrone

2023

Ahem. Usually, when I title reviews, I have the title in English, since I write my reviews in English, and not my preferred language, which would be Ukrainian (Slava Ukraini! Geroiam Slava!), but at the top of the page I tend to have the title as written in whatever language the film was made in, or by, or for.

That would be a confusing thing to do in this instance. So this is a film made by an Italian director, but it’s about the plight of two Senegalese boys trying to emigrate to Europe, and they speak, mostly, Wolof, French, a bit of English and an even tinier bit of Italian.

So I have no idea what language is the “right” one for this flick to be titled in. I’m sticking with the title as written, as this was Italy’s submission to the Academy for Best International Feature Film for 2023 as Io Capitano, and thus it must stay.

I’m not entirely sure if that translates to “I, Captain" or "I am a captain”, or “I am the captain”, or if it’s a reference to the Tom Hanks nauseating thriller Captain Phillips, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least one of those options.

Its relevance only becomes apparent at the very end of the two stressful hours we spend with our protagonists.

And who are our protagonists? Two Senegalese boys called Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall), who are convinced that their fortunes will be made if only they can get themselves to Europe. It doesn’t matter where in Europe, just Europe. They will make big fat wads of money and send it back to their families and also maybe get somewhere with their rapping and musical skills, to the point where white people will fight for their autographs!

I write that not to make fun of the characters, who are just innocent, naive boys all of 15 living their modest lives in the great city of Dakar, just to highlight where they’re coming from. To them the stories of boys their age or older setting out for Europe is practically a rite of passage; from at least the ones that made it there alive.

I mention *that* for two reasons. A drama from a few years ago that I watched, made by a Senegalese director, about those who brave the journey to Spain by boat but don’t make it (being Mati Diop’s Atlantics) also has as its main point that the reasons for going are illusionary, and the likelihood of survival is slim, and then there’s all those grieving friends and family left behind.

But the other point is this: one could be all cynical and ask themselves why an Italian director would be making a film about the trials and tribulations of two Senegalese boys trying to get to Europe, during a time when hard right wing politics (and therefore anti-immigrant sentiment) is on the rise.

Whether it’s Britain, Italy, Sweden, France, the US or Germany, there are far more people than usual keen to vote for the nastiest possible politicians since, oh, I dunno, the 1930s or so, because they tell them all their contemporary problems are somehow caused by these immigrants, therefore the solution to all that ails them is treating asylum seekers, immigrants and generally anyone that doesn’t look like them as if they’re subhuman criminals. Sure, that will fix everything.

You could interpret this flick as an “anti-tourism” advertisement, showing potential emigres just how fucking awful the journey is, how many times they are likely to be attacked, exploited, tortured or worse. But I’m not cynical enough to believe that.

A much wiser, much missed film critic, much more wonderful man than myself once referred to films as having the potential to be empathy machines: elaborate and complicated constructions whose purpose, ultimately, can be to put characters in particular circumstances and then encourage audiences to feel something about their plight. It sounds manipulative, and there’s no doubt it can be, but at its best cinema can show you worlds you never imagined, even if they’re just next door, and get you to feel things you didn’t know you could about people or characters you didn’t know about previously.

So I have to think, to hope that director Matteo Garrone’s purpose is to encourage people to think about how hard it is for these people from nations across the world pursuing what they hope is a better life. They’re people, with hopes and dreams, trying to survive, to do the best they can.

But… what am I trying to say, the things is, I already think of people as human, whether they’re from Senegal or Naples, Brunswick, Aleppo, Lagos, Beagle Bay or Bedford-Stuyvesant. I already sympathise with their struggles, acknowledge their humanity and am not afraid of asylum seekers or immigrants in general or people of different ethnicities or skin colours. This flick, and any flick like it, would only emphasise, or reinforce the thoughts, the moral understanding I already have of the world and the people in it.

What I’m saying is, the people in whom empathy would need to be generated, those who see asylum seekers and refugees as a sub-human horde that wants to invade their homes and steal their coffee makers and jet skis, are never going to see this flick or any flick like this.

The Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who vowed to set up a naval blockade to Stop the Boats coming to Italy from North Africa; Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak, and all their recent predecessors as foreign minister and prime minister respectively for Great Britain, all who vowed to Stop the Boats crossing the Channel; the Scott Morrisons and Peter Duttons of Australia, who vowed to Stop the Boats here: none of any of these absolute and abject fucking arseholes are ever going to sit through a two hour movie dramatising the stories of what these people go through.

And even if, by some miracle they did watch it, it shames me deeply as a human being to admit that it wouldn’t unclench their minds or their sphincters for even a nanosecond.

It is easy and lazy as anything for any of these absolute shitbags, even when some of them are from immigrant backgrounds themselves safely ensconced in their bastions of white supremacy to say shit like “while the events depicted in the recent film Io Capitano are all very sad, it sends a clear message to the people smugglers, and that's when they get back in business, and that's when we see boat arrivals rise, which is why people, good white citizens have to wait so long for their surgeries." Etc etc.

Translate as necessary for your local politicians, to take account of local dialects and bugbears.

Seydou and Moussa however don’t have access to or see the tweets from Suella Braverman or policy statements from Border Force. They just go on what they hear, and they just see what life is like for themselves and their families in Dakar. There is very little opportunity to do anything other than hard labour, which, as kids of 15-16, they shouldn’t really have to do anyway. But life doesn’t care about what’s fair, it just is however harsh it is wherever it is.

Though warned multiple times, including a by a chap who tells them that they don’t realise it, but big European cities have many thousands of people sleeping in the street, much to the kids’ surprise, nothing can really dissuade them. It’s just something that the boys and men around them do, so they act like they don’t really have a choice, despite their misgivings, despite their fears, and despite the thought of upsetting their mothers.

They’re just kids. They’re excited, but they have no idea.

Instead of throwing themselves like lemmings into the waters of the Atlantic with the dream of paddling to Spain, their plan instead sees them travelling east by bus, way way east, through Mali and then Niger, then north – through the goddamn Sahara Desert – to get to Libya, and from there to catch a boat across the Mediterranean to get to Italy.

At every stage of their journey they will meet men, often men with guns, who give absolutely no fucks as to whether Sedou or Moussa live or die. They don’t care if they or anyone with them makes it or not. The further away from Senegal they get, the less people care. Since I depicted their care level from the start being zero, when I say it goes negative, I mean people actively start visiting harm upon the boys and the people around them. To say that the boys, the young poor boyish boys are naïve are one thing, what about the people travelling with them? There are desperate adults right next to them; men, women, young, old – are they all naïve too?

When all of them get abused, tricked, threatened, robbed, tortured or killed, were they all naïve, or just Seydou and Moussa?

To say that their journey is a difficult one understates matters significantly. It’s pretty fucking horrific. About the only thing Seydou, who is kinda our main character, has going for him, is that he’s a genuinely nice chap who seems to care about other people, even when they’re complete strangers. He risks himself above all else to try to protect Moussa, but sometimes it’s not enough. He even tries to save others who are lost, at risk to himself, just because it’s the right thing to do, but he’s just one boy; he can neither stem the tide nor block the sun, nor can he make the Sahara a more hospitable place.

So many bad things happen to them that I’m not even going to refer to them, except that even the worst abuses can’t compel Seydou from his path, or dissuade him from finding his cousin when they are forcibly separated. Even slavery, indentured servitude can’t stop this kid’s irrepressible spirit.

This is a big film where a lot of stuff happens, filmed with an eye towards realism, except for some fantastical interludes, where perhaps, at low points, we see Seydou imagining an alternate course, another way that something might have happened, in order to sooth his aching heart. Those scenes are short, and beautiful, and don’t detract from the brutality of this boy’s odyssey.

The last part of the journey – remember when I said these smugglers don’t give two shits about whether their cargo survives? I don’t know how likely the scenario is for the last watery journey, because I’ve never had to travel tens of thousands of miles on foot or by poorly driven Hilux, or to beg not to be tortured more, or to traverse a sea in a boat so rickety there shouldn’t be one person on it, let alone hundreds of desperate refugees.

But the film does need its title to make sense, in its last triumphant (somehow, perversely) moments.

Let me just say this – if my continued life was dependent on piloting a boat across the Mediterranean, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I’ve not driven any boats, or worked on their engines, or know anything about how to refuel them, or how to survive at sea, none of that stuff. If I had to do it alone it would never happen.

Imagine if people smugglers so callous and so lacking in fucks piled me and a thousand other people onto a rickety matchbox, yelled some instructions at me, and then set me off across the sea.

Well, I imagine I would not handle it half as well as Seydou is expected to do.

At least for the main actors, it doesn’t really feel like they’re acting that much. They come across as kids reacting as disbelieving kids would in circumstances that only get worse as time goes on. Calling it naturalistic is perhaps discounting the work that they do, but it doesn’t feel forced. So many scenes in this flick look less like elements of a movie production and more like a documentary. I’m not saying it’s a documentary – I’m just baffled by how some of the scenes were put together.

This is chilling stuff, yet another tale of survival against the odds, but here the greatest dangers aren’t the indifference of nature or the few places on the planet hostile to human life (unlike the other flick I saw recently being Society of the Snow: it’s always people that are the greatest danger. Callous, selfish pieces of shit, whether they’re the ones wielding the AK-47 or not. People who see desperate, suffering people and think “Ka-Ching!!” instead of “what can I do to help, or, failing that, what can I avoid doing to not make your life any worse?”

This is a hard watch, but it’s a necessary one, perhaps.

8 times I wish there were more people whose first impulse was kindness rather than its opposite out of 10

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“Greetings, dear ancestors, with our deepest respect. We put ourselves entirely in your hands for a journey we're about to make. We want to go to Europe. We ask for your blessing. It's a difficult journey.” – Io Capitano