I'm Not Scared (2003)

Gabriele Salvatores opens on wheat, heat, and children on bicycles, which is the correct order of operations for a film about a nine-year-old who finds a chained boy in a hole. The setting is southern Italy in 1978, during the Years of Lead, and the camera observes the scorched fields with the patience of someone who has decided not to make a speech about them. The heat is heat. The countryside is countryside. Michele Amitrano's discovery is a discovery, and the film lets it stay one.

Consider what the film declines to do. A girl is nearly made to undress by a pack of boys, and the scene plays as childhood cruelty rather than a thesis on gender. Michele's mother shouts down a grown man who has struck her son, and her fury reads as maternal instinct, not doctrine. The kidnapping itself is a crime committed by neighbors who resent the wealth of Milan, and the film frames it as moral horror instead of an argument about redistribution. The captive Filippo is traumatized, not diagnosed. The cast is drawn from local non-professionals, which is regional authenticity, not a casting initiative.

That leaves craft. Italo Petriccione's cinematography won prizes, Giuseppe Cristiano had never acted before, and the whole enterprise sits comfortably in a tradition of Italian coming-of-age cinema that predates the current enthusiasm for instruction. The ledger is blank. We record it without complaint, though the evening did feel somewhat under-scheduled. Ninety percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the sort of figure that usually accompanies a message. Here it accompanies wheat, and a boy running across a field toward a father who is about to shoot him by accident. We sat through it, we took notes, and we found nothing to argue with. That is its own kind of rarity, and we note it with the weary respect it deserves.

THEMATIC TAGS: true_story, book_adaptation. The film is loosely inspired by the real kidnapping wave of the anni di piombo, and it adapts Niccolò Ammaniti's 2001 novel of the same name. It won no Academy Awards, spawned no sequels, remade nothing, and features no superheroes, unless we count a nine-year-old with a bicycle, which we do not.

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