THE SICILIAN GIRL
Directed by Marco Amenta
Produced by Simonetta Amenta, Tilde Corsi, Gianni Romoli, Raphael Berdugo & Amenta
Written by Amenta, Sergio Donati & Gianni Romoli
Released by Music Box Films
Italian with English subtitles
Italy. 110 min. Not Rated
With Veronica D’Agostino, Gérard Jugnot, Marcello Mazzarella, Lucia Sardo, Mario Pupella, Miriana Faja, Primo Reggiani & Francesco Casisa
 

Released last year in Europe, Marco Amenta’s film The Sicilian Girl has many good intentions. Based on a true story, the film follows Rita (Veronica D’Agostino), the daughter of a Sicilian mafia don. Due to her father’s position, she lives a sheltered and privileged life and grows up fiercely proud of the way he and his associates mete out justice. For Rita, the violence the mafia inflicts is legitimate, and the police are merely impediments to this.

Much of her feeling and loyalty is based on the hero worship of her father and a childhood misunderstanding equating fear with respect. When her father, and later her brother, are murdered by a rival don, only then does she rebel, borne out of a desire for revenge as she turns against the Sicilian mafia and informs on them. After she’s put into witness protection, every little bit of her old life is stripped away. Seventeen-year-old Rita learns to cope—or not cope—with her isolation and the death threats that surround her. Amenta is good at creating a real sense of drama and at creating high stakes. Death in the movies often serves as a mere plot device not affecting the main characters, but here the killings are affecting and appropriate. It establishes not simply motivation for Rita but also evokes sympathy in the audience.

Now, when people use the phrase “foreign film” as a category, it makes no sense. “Foreign” is not a genre. By the same token, though, there are certain narrative devices that show up in many European films that differentiate them from the majority of schlocky, mainstream Hollywood films. One thing that makes The Sicilian Girl interesting is that, while sometimes melodramatic, it doesn’t spoon-feed the audience every bit of information. The narrative moves in leaps and bounds. Events occur in the background that are then brought to fruition without having to fill in the audience on every little thing that happened in-between.

However, what make The Sicilian Girl narratively and stylistically compelling is also what makes it dramatically lacking. The problem is the story itself since the arc of a mafia/gangster film is well-known and unsurprising. When Rita enters witness protection, the enormousness of what she’s left behind and her isolation are palpable, but the audience can never dwell on that feeling for too long because the dictates of the story push us fast forward.

As the story unfolds over time, we only see snippets along the way pertinent to the plot. We witness Rita’s isolation in bits and pieces, her (justified) paranoia in dribs and drabs, but never enough for the film to achieve a satisfying ending. The plot plays out neatly as expected, but in a story as familiar as this one, it really needs the weight of the emotions behind it. As the film nears the climax, intellectually the final moments make sense, but emotionally feel incomplete. Andrew Beckerman
August 4, 2010