getting out of the ghetto

1

Nevia – International Competition – SBIFF

With her mother dead and her father in prison, Nevia and her little sister live with her grandmother in a container park on the outskirts of Naples. It’s not the best place for her to grow up. Her grandmother rents out her rooms to prostitutes and runs odd chores for the local crime boss to try and repay the debts Nevia’s father owes. Nevia despises her grandmother for bringing men into their home.

Nevia’s other problem is that Salvatore, the 30 year old son of the crime boss, is infatuated with her. Even though she’s only 17 (and looks younger), he’s already asking her grandmother for her hand in marriage. The prostitution to many men or prostitution to Salvatore is what Nevia fears is her fate.

To escape, she finds work with the local circus. They provide her independence and a more complete family then the one she has at home. It allows her to wean herself away from her grandmother and Salvatore. But when she finds the circus leader has his own problems, she’s redirected to the fate she tried to escape.

Nevia looks a lot like the recent Neapolitan films of Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman). It contains the same grimy urban landscape of rubbish strewn across roads, battered apartment blocks, and lots of concrete and tarmac. It’s a hopeless forgotten Italy in which opportunity doesn’t exist. The only people who succeed are involved in crime, and those that don’t are inevitably linked to them whether they want to or not.

Like Dogman’s main character, Nevia is linked to the criminal underworld by means outside her control. She comes into contact with the criminal bosses because of her father and grandmother. She’s doomed to Salvatore just for living where she grew up. It’s not a problem with her but a condition of the hopeless environment she grows up in.

The welcome difference of Nevia is that it’s led by Nevia, a young female protagonist growing up with her female relatives. It therefore provides a female perspective of life in the hopeless outskirts of urban Italy. The environment for them is much more restrictive than the criminal freedom it afford the men.

2

Mosh – International Competition – SBIFF

Mosh is an aspiring dancer living in the hood in the Dominican Republic. She lives with her mother who is dying from cancer and her cousin Geronimo, who gets by dealing drugs.

Not sure what to make of it. Mosh starts of as if it’s going to be a musical but then changes direction into a hood film after the opening. It features some of the typical hood film tropes: a kid trying to make it out of the hood, a raw undiscovered talent, relative stuck in a gang. But it also features a few scenes of a tall lady playing God, who’s followed around by a man dressed as a pineapple.

God and her pineapple friend appear to characters to talk about death and nostalgia for a life lived. She helps each of the characters become more comfortable with the idea of death. However, whilst the talks are interesting, they never really fit within the main(?) narrative of the film – that of Mosh and her family (question mark as maybe Mosh isn’t the focus?). The discussions are also pretty long and slow which disrupts the flow of the film further. (Even the characters annoyingly start to interrupt themselves as the discussions about mortality and life starts drifting without focus).

I really wanted to like Mosh, but I could never understand what kind of a film it was trying to be. It has too many moving parts. Instead of focusing on one narrative, it tries to follow many (Mosh, her brother, her mother, the drug boss).

There’s also a lot of unanswered questions. Why does Mosh so vehemently correct anyone who calls her Maria? What is this happiness drug? Why does God keep appearing? Why does she have a side kick dressed as a pineapple? We’re also never clear on why Mosh loves dancing and why she is going to all these dance classes and auditions – is she auditioning for a role? Does she want to make it her career? Is it her way of escaping her reality? It’s never really clear. We just have to assume or accept a lot of things that we are shown.

As a result, we’re never really sure what the film is. The convoluted narrative, varied pace, and unanswered questions make it hard to immerse yourself in the film. We never feel like we know Mosh, but we’re also never sure if this film is actually about her, her brother, the hood, or God.