Io Capitano (Garrone, 2023)

Written by Tom Augustine.

There’s a derogatory term in film criticism, ‘misery porn’: films that set out to punish the audience with as much darkness and bleakness as possible, attempting to evoke the harshness and cruelty of humankind at its worst. There are entries in this genre that are undeniable masterworks – Elem Klimov’s Come and See, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies – but many more seem to mistake the depiction of pain and suffering for artistic merit, resulting in woeful efforts like Requiem for a Dream or Capernaum. This is made doubly perilous when a white filmmaker is crafting a work intended to present the plight of peoples from other cultures to a white filmgoing audience, as with something like Lion or Incendies (though that film is not without its merits). If you’re anything like me, you’re immediately on your guard when presented with a work from a white filmmaker attempting to evoke the experiences of other cultures. It’s not an impossible task, but there are many potential pitfalls, misery porn being one of the most common. This kind of manipulative and bad-faith approach characterises non-white societies as harsh, even inhumane, and can be exceptionally damaging even as they bend over backwards to extract tears from pampered festival crowds.

Matteo Garrone, the filmmaker behind the revered Italian gangster saga Gomorrah, is no stranger to misery porn – his Dogman of a few years ago is a notably awful example – but Io Capitano is the first of his films to deal with a culture entirely foreign to his own. It does bear the hallmarks of the worst of these kinds of works, depicting immense, evocatively shot suffering and cruelty, and opening at the glitziest of festivals, the Cannes Film Festival – but to his credit, Garrone seems somewhat aware of this and makes a concentrated effort to counteract some of the more sinister side effects of the subgenre. In this story, two young, naïve Senegalese boys named Seydou and Moussa (Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall), decide to leave their families in an effort to cross from Libya to Europe with the hopes of one day achieving music superstardom. Predictably, things go almost immediately wrong as soon as they hop on the bus. 

Matteo Garrone’s harrowing, Oscar-nominated Io Capitano is a gorgeously shot, well-acted portrait of the exceptional plight of African migrants, one which makes a concentrated effort to distance itself from the cynicism of other manipulative portraits of Third World poverty catered to a white audience. Though it doesn’t entirely divorce itself from the punishing misery-baiting of this peculiar subgenre, Garrone’s direction leaves just enough room for grace to justify the journey.

Their gruelling, terrifying journey is drawn from the real experiences of migrants, who Garrone reportedly interviewed extensively in order to render their experiences authentically. One of the canniest things that Garrone does to counteract the manipulative aspect of this type of story is in the rendering of Seydou, who is presented as an actual, fallible human, rather than a blank canvas at which to throw horrifying material. His life in Senegal is not one of abject poverty or misfortune – rather, Garrone renders Senegal in loving, colourful detail. An early scene of a festival is lively and joyous, and Seydou’s condition is one of teenage longing for a world beyond the one he knows, not that of a cornered victim fleeing certain death. Seydou’s choice is headstrong and even selfish, leaving behind a loving mother and several sisters. Seydou’s leaving of his mother is treated as an essential keystone to his later experiences, and it is this regret that ensures that Seydou retains his humanity throughout. Most striking is a sequence set during a long trek through the Sahara Desert, which the migrants must cross if they hope to see the Libyan port. A middle aged woman who looks remarkably like Seydou’s mother collapses in the sand and Seydou risks his own life to go back for her. Because we have been imprinted with the wonderful presence of Seydou’s actual mother, performed vividly by Khady Sy as a woman raging against her son’s choice but painfully aware that she can’t change his mind, this later choice hits with profundity. 

Garrone has arguably smoothened some of the more notable aspects of his directorial style here – I’ve seen Io Capitano referred to as akin to the work of Garth Davis, which feels a little insulting – but there’s no denying a certain mildness to this work filmically, despite the horrors of the film’s later half. Beyond an interesting approach in which he crossfades between sequences recurrently, perhaps attempting to inject a mythic quality to the work, there’s little here that stands out as particularly idiosyncratic, though the film is well shot throughout. The performances are strong – particularly Sarr and Sy. Sarr’s expressive, innocent visage is our viewpoint on this world, and the young actor is up to the task, conveying desperation but a fundamental hopefulness that gives us an anchor even in the darkness. It’s difficult to find cynicism in Io Capitano. Garrone is understandably passionate about this issue, and it’s commendable that he sinks his teeth into the subject with such openness. The film seems to be in conversation with itself – how manipulative is all this, really? A straight answer is never arrived at, which ironically allows for the film to wriggle into the subconscious all the more.

Io Capitano is in cinemas now.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE TRAILER