‘Napoli-New York’: Red Sea Review

Dir. Gabriele Salvatores. Italy. 2024. 122mins

Gabriele Salvatores’s Napoli–New York is predicated on an early script therapy by Federico Fellini, however there’s little right here that you just’d take into account ‘Felliniesque’ – should you take that to imply dream-like, febrile, infused with the grotesque. This good-natured yarn about two Italian little one little one stowaways to New York has no scarcity of exuberance, however total this can be a gentle train in interval picaresque that lacks a classy edge. Nonetheless, the movie made a really wholesome late November home debut earlier than heading to the Crimson Sea Pageant; trying forward, characterful younger leads, a jovial efficiency from Italian star Pierfrancesco Favino, and Salvatores’s personal auteur rep are its greatest bets for hooking audiences. 

A gentle train in interval picaresque

Author-director Salvatores – additionally at the moment creative director of the Milan Movie Pageant – achieved his nice second of worldwide glory with a world Oscar for 1991’s Mediterraneo, then scored art-house/mainstream crossover success with the 2003 adaptation I’m Not Scared. Since then, his cachet has primarily been restricted to Italy.

His script right here is predicated on a therapy relationship again to the mid-40s – found in 2006 and subsequently printed – co-written by Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, his long-term collaborator on greats together with La Strada and La Dolce Vita. The story is in three elements, with bookending episodes in Italy and the US and an ocean voyage in between. It begins in Naples in 1949, the place a bomb left over from the warfare leaves 10-year-old orphan Celestina (Dea Lanzaro) alone and wandering the streets. She groups up with an older boy, streetwise Carmine (Antonio Guerra), whose wheeling and dealing contains an association with an American ship’s cook dinner (Omar Benson Miller) to promote a jaguar cub. That rip-off leads to the youngsters discovering themselves on board the ship because it sails, leaving them unwitting stowaways to New York. 

An ocean-bound center part sees the duo dodging the vessel’s boozy captain (Tomas Araña) and gruff however kindly purser Garofalo (Favino). The youngsters additionally uncover the reality of transatlantic journey: pampered wealthy up above, impoverished Italian emigrants shuttered beneath in squalor. This haves/have-nots commentary is couched – due to Rita Rabassini’s plush manufacturing design – in glossily retro mode someplace between Titanic and Spanish chic-pulp TV sequence Excessive Seas. 

When the youngsters arrive in New York – the place Celestina errors the Statue of Liberty for the Madonna of Pompeii – the movie strikes into a unique register, and an altogether much less believable one. This Manhattan has a weird theme-park really feel, each out there wall plastered with retro-kitsch posters promoting Happiness and the American Method, with a large number of extras kitted out as if for a 40s-styled music video. Getting down to find Celestina’s older sister (Anna Lucia Pierro), the children discover their approach to Little Italy, the place they discover a welcoming berth with Garafalo and his spouse (Anna Ammirati); then the movie morphs once more, this time right into a courtroom drama.

There’s a level of darkish realism at work, notably within the pictures of a ravaged Naples, within the shipboard depiction of social distress and sophistication distinction, and in a sinister close-up (the one authentically Felliniesque second) that means Celestina narrowly escaping the peril of kid prostitution. In any other case, this story of plucky innocents at massive is all too cosily benign.

The forged is uneven however typically participating – regardless of a weird vary of roughly believable American accents within the sporadic English dialogue – with Favino bullishly genial and Antonio Catania cheerfully guzzling the décor as a manic newsman. The children are actually terrific discoveries – younger Lanzaro making Celestina each feisty and considerably cranky, whereas Guerra offers his all to the sketchy function of a tyro powerful nut, to particularly successful impact in his defiant face-offs with Favino.

However the three chapters by no means fairly gel into a complete, and the New York part particularly takes some swallowing – not least in such particulars as a crowd of girls demonstrating with banners emblazoned with ‘Ladies’s Liberation’ (a time period already extant however probably not in forex till the 60s). Comparable anachronisms fill the soundtrack, which is much less of a sin – though it’s a leap to make use of the Ronettes’ ‘Be My Child’ to suggest the spirit of 1949 Manhattan when the track may hardly scream 1963 any extra definitively. (Plus factors, although, for a uncommon display use of Procol Harum’s grandiose gem ‘A Salty Canine’.)