Italian Race (2016)

Matteo Rovere's Italian Race arrives bearing the modest credentials of a national sports drama, and it conducts itself with the quiet dignity of a film that has no interest in being anything else. We follow Giulia De Martino, seventeen and preternaturally gifted behind the wheel, as she navigates the GT Championship under the wing of a father who is also her coach and, eventually, her absence. When the estranged brother Loris reappears, all frayed nerves and supernatural feel for the road, the film settles into a familiar rhythm of engines, arguments, and reconciliation. The machinery is loud. The emotions are louder. It is, in the grand tradition of the genre, a story about a family learning to be a family while driving very fast.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is temperate to the point of reticence. Giulia occupies a male-dominated cockpit, and the screenplay glances at the friction of that arrangement without ever mounting a case. She wants to be taken seriously as a driver. The film agrees, then moves on. There is no broader thesis about gender, no sermon, no moment where a character pauses the race to explain the moral of the race. The Italian countryside, the white and wealthy, offers no occasion for commentary on race, class, or the climate, the last of which the film treats with the uncomplicated affection of a gearhead who has never once considered a carbon footprint.

What remains is a lean, competent melodrama of combustion and grief, loosely tethered to the real career of rally driver Carlo Capone. It preaches nothing, which in this climate is its own small virtue. We are left with a father, a daughter, a brother, and a checkered flag, and the suspicion that the film would be baffled to learn anyone expected more. Grade: merit, mild. Cultural freight: negligible. A perfectly respectable afternoon at the cinema, and not a moment of instruction to be found within it.