Writer-director Jonas Carpignano’s A Chiara promises a tale of teenage happiness. Early on, the film’s camera quickly follows 15-year-old Chiara (Swamy Rotolo) as she takes selfies with her friends, scrolls Instagram in order to find girls to say mean things to, and enjoys a pleasantly chaotic family life with her parents and sisters at their home in the Calabria region of Italy. In a moving sequence at a birthday party where her father, Claudio (Claudio Rotolo), is too shy to make a toast but happy to dance the bachata with his daughter, Chiara’s only worry seems to be whether or not he will find out that she smokes.
In this moment, we not only get a glimpse of how strong Chiara and Claudio’s bond is, but you may find yourself yearning for the lovefest to continue as you start to dread that some horrible disturbance is about to befall them. And once the long-deferred disruption finally explodes on the screen, literally, A Chiara loses some of its emotional pull. What begins as a portrayal of adolescent bliss, more a slice-of-life story than a plot-driven one, becomes a sinister thriller involving smuggling, drug-dealing, and involuntary foster care arrangements.
Rotolo’s face sustains a fascinating rawness throughout A Chiara that Carpignano often captures in transfixing close-ups. The young actress’s expressions feel disarmingly sincere and rife with the ambiguities that the film’s narrative preoccupations lack once Carpignano begins to trade out intransitive feelings for slightly contrived and goal-driven suspense. (A Chiara is the final work in Carpignano’s Calabrian trilogy set in Gioia Tauro, a southern Italian port in the hands of the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, following Mediterranea and A Ciambra.)
The film’s first section isn’t exactly devoid of drama, but its tension is at least atmospheric. Something haunts Chiara’s joyfulness—a suspicion that the repressed will return with a vengeance. And the fear that she will eventually be hurt, or betrayed, is enough plot to make A Chiara an immersive experience. But once it starts taking on the contours of a thriller, which is baked into everything from Claudio evading the police to news of his criminal record being predictably read out by a television reporter, the film starts going through the expected narrative motions in order to get to the requisite resolution. Chiara slips away from her almost documentary-like persona and assumes the more artificial position of a character.
A Chiara’s initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager. A brief moment when Chiara tries to learn her father’s shady trade in order to be close to him is refreshingly unanticipated. But the young woman quickly runs away from the action, and we’re back to worrying about whether or not criminals will get caught instead of getting lost in the contradicting emotions bursting out of a teenager’s pimply face.
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