29/02/2024 - Marco D'Amore's second fiction film navigates opposing ideologies and mingles reality with dreams in a nocturnal, humid and unprecedented portrait of Naples

An indefinable film, set in a version of Naples verging on Gotham City, which navigates between two absolutisms, one political and the other religious, while blending reality and dream. “More than indefinable, it’s an inexplicable film”, its author Marco D’Amore points out, whose latest movie Caracas - distributed in Italian cinemas as of today, 29 February, by Vision Distribution - marks his second fiction feature film directorial effort after The Immortal [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. The actor-director-screenwriter who made his name playing the part of the iconic Ciro Di Marzio in the Gomorrah series has taken the book Napoli ferrovia by Ermanno Rea (whose work also formed the basis of Mario Martone’s Nostalgia [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mario Martone
interview: Pierfrancesco Favino
film profile]) and teamed up with his usual writing partner in crime, Francesco Ghiaccio, to transpose that stream of consciousness, that existential diary of a man – a famous writer who hasn’t returned to Naples for many years and who is making peace with his life and with the beloved/despised city which sired him - into images. The result is a sorrowful film which voyages between different temporal planes and which offers up moments of great expressive force, but which risks losing the audience at a given point in time.

The force with which D’Amore catapults us into the bowels of a barbaric ideology – that of the racist far right – at the beginning of the film as it follows a group of Neapolitan Nazi skinheads, first in their lair and then during a gut-wrenchingly cruel nighttime raid against the city’s Muslim community, is well worth a mention: it’s incredibly impactful, compelling and disturbing. This is where we meet Caracas (Marco D’Amore), a man who’s clearly at war with himself, torn between fascist ideology and a desire for peace: he sings the Duke’s praises but is also in love with a Muslim girl, the problematic Yasmina (French actress of Tunisian origin Lina Camélia Lumbroso), and soon afterwards, after one knife attack too many, we see him converting to Islam. The film’s focus then switches to another character, Giordano Fonte (Toni Servillo, who was Marco D’Amore’s teacher in the theatre world), an acclaimed and disenchanted writer in the throes of an existential and professional crisis who seizes the opportunity offered by a literary prize to return home to Naples, which he no longer recognises, and to announce his intention of giving up writing.

It’s in this nocturnal and humid version of Naples, resembling a Brazilian favela from which the city's skyline can be seen in the distance and where child gangs rage, that increasingly bewildered Giordano crosses paths with Caracas and strikes up an unexpected friendship with him. The latter acts as Giordano’s guide through the underbelly of the city, negotiating a circle of hell characterised by nighttime haunts, orphanages and drug dens. What unites these two men who are so different in age and social class is the need to find their place in the world and feel a sense of belonging: Caracas initially seeks this out in fascist gangs, then in spirituality, and finally in his love for Yasmina, while Giordano tries to find himself in his characters.

The pace of the film is meditative, Rodrigo D’Erasmo’s music has real presence, and reality and imagination blend until they’re dangerously indistinguishable. Does Caracas really exist or does he reside solely in the writer’s mind? “Sometimes it’s better not to know”, Giordano’s narrating voice tells us repeatedly at the beginning and the end of this film, a film which is courageous in its own way, which has its own directorial approach and which conveys its message (ideology aside, light comes from the person who lends us a hand), but which, ultimately, feels a little threadbare and slowly loses its grip on the audience.

Caracas is produced by Picomedia, Mad Entertainment and Vision Distribution, in collaboration with Prime Video and Sky.

(Translated from Italian)