Under the Sicilian sunlight, Oscar collects scrap metal with his father. At the other end of town, Stanley the Nigerian migrant gets by thanks to small tasks given by the parish priest. Both share the same desire for a better life. Michele Pennetta’s freewheeling, painterly quasi-documentary follows the paths of two teenagers, a native and an immigrant, as they experience their bodies under the Sicilian sun. What partly makes the film appear fictional is the suggestion of a theme: a sense of grace, or hope, intimated by the organ music, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, played early on in the church that Stanley cleans, and reprised at the end. Apart from the Catholic connotations of Il mio corpo, ‘my body’, the film is also about the corporeal experience of being in the world. This is apparent in the African meals that Stanley and Blessed enjoy together, in the intimacy of their interlude bathing in the sea, and in the bike sequences, the camera rolling ahead of Oscar and his brother as they cruise along winding roads (highly crafted sound design catches the bikes’ rattle and the hiss of gravel). Shot in ’Scope, the film unashamedly cultivates a painterly approach, notably in some chiaroscuro shots and in its landscapes. The colour palette boots up the blues of the Sicilian sky, with a panorama of parched hills bisected by a long white diagonal of sheep. There’s also a striking close-up of Stanley as he stops to contemplate the hills around him. Pennetta likes to get right up to his characters as they pause for thought, the camera hunkering down at table height for low-angle close-ups at the Prestifilippo dinner table. The sense of narrative shaping only emerges fully when the two leads finally meet. Oscar finds himself at night at the old mine where Stanley is camping; they spot each other at a distance, two patches of torchlight in the dark. Pennetta cuts to Oscar asleep in Stanley’s bed, his host sitting nearby, keeping silent vigil. Nothing is said, but the final burst of the Stabat Mater suggests a redemptive act of everyday samaritanism: a contrived but modestly executed moment in which this documentary, if it truly is that, earns its closure as a story economically and satisfyingly told.
Director Michele Pennetta
Writers Arthur Brugger, Pietro Passarini, Michele Pennetta