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ANGELA
5/10
Italy 2001 : Roberta Torre : 95 mins
A
striking big-screen debut from acclaimed Italian theatre actress Donatella
Fiocchiaro is the main reason to see Angela, a well-observed but
somewhat slight tale of small-time Mafia folk in mid-80s Sicily, based
on real events. Angela is the thirtyish trophy wife of the much older
Saro (Mario Pupella), and helps out in most areas of the family business
- their shoe-shop being a front for a well-organised cocaine-dealing network.
Things run smoothly until charismatic young hood Masino (Andrea Di Stefano)
joins the operation – Angela struggles to resist his cocky charms, and
they drift into a highly dangerous affair. She’s placed in an impossible
position when the police swoop on the organisation and arrest the major
players: they have wire-taps of compromising conversations between the
couple, and threaten to spill the beans to Saro unless Angela turns stool-pigeon
and breaks the Mafia’s code of silence.
It’s
unusual to find a film revolving around such a sympathetic and unapologetic
member of the cosa nostra – Angela must decide whether she respects
her crime “family’s” unspoken vows of silence more than the marriage vows
she’s shattered with Masino. This is the moral crux of the story, and
Fiocchiaro is never less than compelling, conveying Angela’s anguish and
inner strength with subtletly and restraint.
Though
prone to the odd touch of ill-advised, self-conscious artiness, director
Torre is mostly as brisk and businesslike as her heroine, chopping her
narrative into manageable small sections as crisply and nimbly as her
heroine divides up the cocaine into their shoe-sized bags. To indicate
the passage of time, Torre regularly cuts to an electric office-desk calendar
to show exactly when everything is taking place. This unusual chronological
precision is one of several elements that add to the thoroughly convincing,
behind-the-headlines feel of the film, along with Daniele Cipri’s hand-held
camerawork, uniformly believable performances, and costuming that shows
the ‘Old Country’ branches of the Mafia are just as fond of big hair,
leather jackets and gold jewellery as their American cousins (and that’s
just the men).
But Angela’s fidelity to the facts (perhaps ironic, given its heroine’s
extra-marital transgressions) is also the movie’s downfall. Conditioned
by Hollywood crime thrillers, we expect much more from Angela than
the real events allow it to deliver: Torre’s script delivers a strong
set-up and middle act, then comes to a rather abrupt halt on a poignant
but bathetic note of romantic suspended-animation. In retrospect, there
isn’t that much to Angela’s tale – the writer-director should perhaps
have used the facts as merely the starting-point for a more imaginatively
fictional end-product. What Torre does, she do well – but she’s only really
only made half a movie.
27th August, 2002 (seen 20th,
Cameo Edinburgh – Edinburgh
Film Festival)
For all the
reviews from the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival
click here.
by Neil
Young
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