20/11/2024 - Gabriele Salvatores’ movie based on a screenplay by Federico Fellini is dedicated to young audiences but takes an overly casual approach to blending themes like inclusion and gender

“I’d always dreamed of becoming an adjective when I grew up. I’m flattered by it”, Federico Fellini stated in an interview released in 1993. The adjective “Felliniesque”, used in relation to certain situations, should be used with greater restraint, much like “Kafkaesque”. And it shouldn’t ever be applied to certain films or directors (if they’re not called Scorsese, Greenaway, Fosse, Michalkov or Kusturica). In the case of Gabriele Salvatores’ new movie, Naples to New York [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which is hitting Italian cinemas on 21 November via 01, this adjective is relatively appropriate, given that Fellini wrote the film’s screenplay together with Tullio Pinelli in the late Eighties. Composed of approximately 80 pages, Salvatores has made this story his own, shooting it in his own particular style.

It’s 1949 and we’re in Naples where an unexploded bomb from the Second World War brings down an entire building: the surviving little girl (Dea Lanzaro) is our protagonist, together with her friend, little Carmine (Antonio Guerra). Now orphans, they try to survive in a city brought to its knees by poverty. A chance encounter with George (Omar Benson Miller), who’s the chef on board the Victory steamship which is getting ready to set sail for New York, provides them with an opportunity to stow away and travel to Celestina’s big sister, Agnese (Anna Lucia Pierro), in the Bronx. After a voyage spent running away from the Italian purser (Pierfrancesco Favino), before eventually becoming the ship’s mascots, the pair disembark on Ellis Island, avoiding border control, and set foot on the New Continent with their noses in the air and their eyes wide. “There is no way like the American way”, insists a billboard (made famous by Margaret Bourke-White’s photography for the cover of Life magazine). But life isn’t easy in the Bronx either: Agnese is in prison on death row for having killed an American boy who’d promised to marry her back in Naples but who subsequently ran off to his wife once in New York. Things take a turn thanks to the solidarity of the Italian community and the mobilisation of the women’s rights movement.

Salvatores is a director who has continually pondered the different forms film can take and different narrative models, constantly experimenting and changing tack throughout his 40-year career. In this instance, he opts for comedy, staying faithful to themes which are close to his heart, namely a journey and characters who are forced to act in an unfamiliar space, with moments of humour (the Statue of Liberty being replaced by Our Lady of Pompei, the Chaplinesque police chase to catch the two protagonists who’ve stolen a cake…) and tragic situations (such as the immigrants’ suffering on the ship). Naples to New York should be seen for what it really is: a film for children with elements which also appeal to adults; a coming-of-age story suspended in time where the camera moves at child-height and the colours and images have a dreamlike dimension (Diego Indraccolo is the film’s director of photography); a neorealist fairy tale devised by Fellini before he was “Felliniesque”, having collaborated on the screenplay for Rossellini’s masterpiece Paisan. Salvatores goes along with this wonderfully “varnished” approach and fills his frames with iconic North American associations, from skyscrapers through to the black blues singer who plays guitar on the veranda, whilst also opting for a didactic soundtrack (Roberto De Simone and Franco Corelli in Naples, A Salty Dog by Procol Harum on the ship, The Ronettes, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Durante, Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits’ growly version of Somewhere in New York). And, ultimately, in just a few minutes, he manages to blend together three popular themes, albeit too hastily: inclusion (when the migrants in question were Italian), racial discrimination against people of African heritage, and gender.

Naples to New York was produced by Paco Cinematografica together with RAI Cinema.

(Translated from Italian)