With A Chiara, now streaming on Hulu, ascendant Italian filmmaker Jonas Carpignano completes a contemporary trilogy of films set in the country’s Calabrian region. The film follows in the footsteps of 2015’s Mediterranea and 2018’s A Ciambra, even sharing some characters across projects. But here, a young girl takes center stage as she confronts the criminal underworld that consumes her disappeared father. What will she find first: herself or her desired answers?
A CHIARA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Everything seems fine and normal in the Guerrasio clan as they gather to celebrate a rite of passage: the 18th birthday of their daughter Guilia (Grecia Rotolo). But the pervasive peace in their life comes to a screeching halt when a car bomb detonated outside the event jolts 15-year-old Chiara (Swamy Rotolo). She watches her father flee the scene and slowly begins to piece together his ties to the mafia.
Chiara’s investigations put her in the crosshairs of many unsavory characters who care little for her desire to reconstitute their family unit. Her burning desire to locate her father and the truth of her family’s existence continues in the face of warnings and in spite of the alienation of her community. “You can’t understand,” Chiara gets scolded – but that won’t stop her from trying.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Among its Italian peers, Carpignano’s work most resembles the hardscrabble realism of Matteo Garrone, who’s best known for films like mafia drama Gomorrah and modern morality play Dogman. But at its core, A Chiara is a coming-of-age story pitched as a loss-of-innocence fable, recalling such beautifully bitter pills as Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank or Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides.
Performance Worth Watching: Swamy Rotolo is an absolute force of nature in A Chiara as she plays a teenager with an iron will and a propulsive drive to learn the true nature of the world around her. In Chiara’s drive to make sense of the senselessness, Rotolo manages to contain both a childlike sense of guilelessness and an incredibly adult feeling of disillusionment. She’s a remarkably humanistic anchor to the film.
Memorable Dialogue: “The less you know, the better,” Chiara is told as she presses forward with her relentless need to learn more about the forces undergirding her life. She quickly learns why Italian towns across the country leave the forces of organized crime alone – their corrupt reign of power is stable enough. People can either be silent or get silenced.
Sex and Skin: None to report. A Chiara is a rare movie centering around an adolescent’s newfound maturity that is unmoored from any exploration of their sexuality.
Our Take: This might be an Italian film, but pardon our French – A Chiara ultimately becomes “F— Around and Find Out: The Movie.” The deeper Chiara gets into the seedy underbelly of her region, the more the cinematography and editing of Carpignano’s begin to resemble a horror film. Yet in spite of all the aesthetic trickery to build excitement, A Chiara becomes a bit of a slog as it circles the same scenarios and revelations for extended periods of time. While it can be exciting on a minute-to-minute basis, the film never quite becomes anything larger or deeper than is suggested by its premise.
Our Call: SKIP IT. If you want a slice of Italian life, try one of Jonas Carpignano’s other Italian-set films like A Ciambra or Mediterranea. With A Chiara, he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too by having a sensationalist-tinged story against a naturalistic backdrop. While Swamy Rotolo can light up the frame with her insistent inquisition, her dynamic presence alone is not enough to hold attention for two hours.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.