rivista di studi italiani 156 cinema suffer the children: violence and

RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI
CINEMA
SUFFER THE CHILDREN:
VIOLENCE AND YOUTH IN CONTEMPORARY ITALIAN CINEMA
MARY ANN MCDONALD CAROLAN
Fairfield University
Fairfield, Connecticut
I
talian films in the first decade of the twentieth-first century portray
wrenching scenes in which children suffer torture, trauma and death. The
long list of movies that feature children as victims of emotional and
physical abuse, accidental death, kidnapping, incest, prostitution and murder
includes, but certainly is not limited to, Moretti’s Stanza del figlio (2001),
Salvatores’s Io non ho paura (2003), Castellitto’s Non ti muovere (2004),
Ozpetek’s Cuore sacro (2005), Comencini’s La Bestia nel cuore (2005),
Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (2005), Rossi Stuart’s
Anche libero va bene (2006), and Ozpetek’s Un giorno perfetto (2008).
Many established younger directors have made films in which a child suffers
emotional or physical pain. The proliferation of this thematic concern in the
last decade seems particularly curious in the context of Italian society, which
arguably values children more than most. This essay examines the persistent
violence directed at children in selected works of Salvatores, Giordana, and
Ozpetek and posits that the child in contemporary Italian films acts as both
witness to societal problems and vehicle for adult introspection.
The depiction of children suffering in film is nothing new; throughout the
long arc of Italian filmmaking there are examples of children, feisty and
mature beyond their years, combating political and social oppression.
Children, key figures in neorealist films, suffer in Rossellini’s war trilogy in
particular. They act as tiny soldiers who incite the wrath and revenge of the
occupying German forces in Roma città aperta (1945), they are
intermediaries for, and sometimes nemeses of, American soldiers in Paisà
(1946) and they resign themselves to oblivion in Germania anno zero (1948).
Insofar as the suffering inflicted upon children in the neorealist films
emanates from the war and its aftermath, it appears as a natural, albeit tragic,
consequence of armed conflict.
Sixty years later in the films of the new millennium, wounded, orphaned
young children, reminiscent of those who populated neorealist classics, now
inhabit a postmodern world that appears even more treacherous. 1 In
contemporary Italian film children suffer the consequences of society’s
failure to solve intransigent problems. In these modern fables adults react to
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serious issues such as economic disparity, uncontrolled immigration, and the
disintegration of marriage by committing desperate acts of terrorism,
profiteering and murder/suicide. Invariably their unwitting victims are
children, whether by intention or by accident. Despite the gnawing sense that
these young people will not escape the physical and emotional pains that their
parents and other adults have imposed upon them, a semblance of hope
remains when a child survives to tell his or her tale.
Children serve as witnesses to societal problems and failures in Gabriele
Salvatores’s Io non ho paura and Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato
non puoi più nasconderti, two cinematographic adaptations of literary works.
Salvatores’s film follows closely Niccoló Ammaniti’s popular 2001 novel Io
non ho paura which tells the tale of two young boys trapped in an adult
nightmare. The narrative, set in southern Italy in 1978, underscores the
tensions in Italy between the industrialized north and the agricultural south
that contributed, in part, to terrorist activities. Against the backdrop of a sunbaked countryside, Michele Amitrano and the other children of the fictitious
village of Acqua Traverse (a town whose very name evokes a lack of
agreement) fill the incredibly hot and dry summer days with cruel games and
races far from the eyes and thoughts of their parents. Yet, there is real terror
under the undulating fields of golden grain that Salvatores so lovingly
portrays. Filippo, a young boy Michele’s own age from a wealthy northern
family, has been kidnapped and imprisoned underground. Michele first
discovers the imprisoned boy and later the conspirators of the ransom plot.
Once the adults, who included Michele’s own parents, realize that he knows
about the boy, they decide they must kill their captive. When Michele
overhears this plan, he runs, at night, to rescue Filippo, whom he had
liberated earlier for an afternoon of play in the sunlight.
Io non ho paura resonates with the reality of gli anni di piombo, a decade
or so characterized by terrorist activity, kidnappings and shootings.
Ammaniti’s story fictionalizes the reality of 1970s Italy in which wealthy
northern children were routinely kidnapped, transported to the south or to
Sardinia where they were held until their parents paid a ransom.
Kidnappings of the kind became so common that the Italian government
passed a highly controversial law in 1991 that gave the government the right
to freeze the bank accounts of kidnapped children so as to discourage
criminals from this type of criminal act 2.
Whereas the novel establishes this work as a memoir with the narrator
retelling the events that occurred decades earlier in the first person (in a
manner reminiscent of Tornatore’s 1988 cinematic memoir Nuovo Cinema
Paradiso), Salvatores insists on the perspective of the youthful protagonist by
directing his cinematographer Italo Petriccione to shoot scenes from the eyelevel of ten year-old Michele. The child’s point of view reinforces the sense
of moral questioning for children can “see” certain moral truths that escape
their elders. Even though the child’s gaze may be associated with the purity
of childhood, the film’s frank examination of the kidnapping and ransom
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eliminates any sense of nostalgia. Most importantly, the youthful perspective
allows the audience to appreciate the moral authority found in the figure of
the child. Michele’s ethical standards distinguish him even among his peers.
In one of the cruel games overseen by the bully Teschio, Michele offers to
accept the punishment so that Barbara, the only girl in the group besides his
younger sister Maria, will not have to unbutton her pants. When the children
return home from their day of riding bikes and exploring the fields, once
again it is Michele who doubles back to collect his sibling’s broken
eyeglasses from the ruined farmhouse that serves as the children’s meeting
place. Michele’s sense of responsibility towards Maria leads him to the
discovery of Filippo in a crudely fashioned dungeon. When Michele realizes
that his parents, and by extension, the rest of the adult inhabitants of Acqua
Traverse, are involved in this horrific act, he does the right thing. He
provides Filippo with food and company, even carrying him around the fields
on his back one blissful, sunny afternoon. Michele risks his own safety
repeatedly to take care of his new friend, but nowhere more courageously
than in the end when he saves Filippo from being murdered.
Marco Tullio Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (2005),
like Salvatores’s Io non ho paura, offers a child’s perspective, both literally
and figuratively, on the critical problem of illegal immigration 3. In this film,
both point of view and montage reinforce the notion of the film’s youthful
perspective. Roberto Missiroli, who was responsible for the film’s montage,
stated: “Il punto di vista del bambino, sottolineato dal fatto di presentare
quasi tutte le scene viste da lui, lo abbiamo rafforzato in una seconda fase
rispetto all’oggettività del primo montaggio” (Giordana, 63). Whereas
Salvatores’s film examines the desperate criminal measures taken by
individuals to address economic disparity in Italy in the 1970s, Giordana’s
film addresses immigration, perhaps the most pressing problem facing
contemporary Italy. According to the director, this film reflects the reality of
the immigrant population in Brescia where the story takes place (Giordana, 67). The film’s protagonist, Sandro, enters the alternative universe of illegal
immigrants after falling overboard from a yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. He
nearly drowns before a young Romanian clandestino named Radu plucks him
from the water. Sandro’s return to Italy as an immigrant allows Giordana to
investigate Italy’s reception of a tidal wave of illegal immigrants who arrive
in the country by precarious means. The topos of the Italian citizen returning
home as immigrant reminds the viewer of Amelio’s Lamerica (1994) in that
both films signal a shift in the historic emigration of millions from Italy to
America, the land of promise. In these films, Italy, not America, beckons to
immigrants who attempt to enter the country illegally by any means possible.
Sandro’s parents’ apparent loss of their child underscores the precarious
nature of families with only one child. Their family constellation reflects the
phenomenon of il bambino negato, a term that refers to the precipitous
decline in the Italian birthrate as well as to Italian families’ desire for two
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children despite the fact that they have only one (Sutton, 354). In Quando sei
nato non puoi più nasconderti the absence of another child is felt most
acutely when Sandro is presumed drown. Radu and Alina, destined to
become wards of the Italian state at best, or, at worst, slaves to the vagaries of
their illegal status, are also lost children. Yet Sandro’s parents, Bruno and
Lucia, hesitate when their son suggests that his family adopt the two young
people, orphans themselves, who saved his life. Sandro readily considers
Radu and Alina family, even offering a fictional account for his father to
explain their appearance: “Perché non dici che sono figli tuoi? Dici che li hai
avuti tanti anni fa con una moldava. Poi lei é morta e loro sono venuti a
cercarti!” (Giordana, 138). Sandro’s more nuanced appreciation of the
complex plight of immigrants in Italy convinces him that his family should
do everything in their power to help his new friends remain in Italy. His
newfound appreciation of the immigrant experience compels him to travel to
Milan to find Alina after she fled Brescia in the middle of the night with
Radu. When, at the end of the film, Sandro learns that her purported big
brother Radu (who has been deemed an adult according to the X-rays taken at
the centro di accoglienza) has forced her into prostitution, the shock of this
latest exploitation seems unbearable. What seemed to be the worst possible
nightmare – a child falls overboard at night as a father sails away, unaware of
his son’s predicament – pales in comparison when Sandro encounters Alina
in garish make-up listening to pop music in private bedroom deep inside an
abandoned warehouse, now an immigrant camp. This oasis of luxury in the
dilapidated remains of an industrial complex underscores the degradation
visited upon Alina. Forced into prostitution, for and by the exploitation of
adults, Alina suffers, perhaps without even knowing how desperate her
situation is. At the end of the film the viewer wonders if worse tragedies
could befall children4.
The genesis for Ozpetek’s film is the eponymous collection of short essays
by Maria Pace Ottieri that explores the immigrant experience in Italy. The
title story in this collection tells of the Sierra Leone immigrant, Ebar Soraya
iti dogon, whose name in the West African language of Mandinka translates
in Italian to quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti. Ottieri explains the
significance of the title to contemporary Italy: “Ovvero, chiunque deve e puó
trovare il proprio posto nel mondo, siamo tutti uguali. Non é un merito
nascere in Italia, non é una colpa nascere in Sudan. Quel personaggio uscito
di senno racchiude tutte le difficoltà, le lacerazioni, gli ostacoli infiniti
nell’incontro tra un individuo che viene da un altro paese e una società come
la nostra, cosí complessa e articolata” (Giordana, 65)5.
Both films described above demonstrate the power of narratives to help
young people understand the reality, and cruelty, of their world. The
protagonists, Michele and Sandro, have encounters that seem more fantastic
than real. In fact, the children in these films appear to inhabit the world of
fairy tales. As Maria Tatar points out in her study of the power of storytelling
in childhood, the realm of fairy tales is that of the young: “As we grow older,
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we begin to draw boundaries and develop the sense of critical detachment
that makes it harder to inhabit a fictional world” (22). As its title suggests, Io
non ho paura demonstrates the power of the imagination to overcome fears,
both real and imaginary. Michele uses storytelling to calm himself and his
sister. After Filippo’s rant about the raccoons (gli orsetti lavatori) that his
father had learned of in America, Michele incorporates those seemingly
fantastic animals into his stories. At particularly critical junctures, he
imagines himself to be Tiger Jack, the comic book hero Tex Willer’s
courageous sidekick in a strategy that Tatar calls identification (19). He
repeats the mantra “io non ho paura” in order to steel himself when, to save
Filippo’s life, he, like Dante, must pass through a dark wood inhabited by
vicious animals to find his new friend6. Ironically, the fantastic world of
Michele’s narratives reveals itself as truer and more morally compelling than
the adult world.
In Giordana’s film, on the other hand, Sandro joins a mysterious world of
boatpeople seeking to enter Italy illegally. His time on the boat with the
clandestini bears no resemblance to his schoolboy existence in an elegant
villa in Emilia Romagna. Sandro’s alienation from the world his parents
inhabit resembles that of Michele whose life revolves around the fields and
their secrets while his parents and the other adults conduct their affairs
mostly indoors. First in Brescia where he meets the frustrated and deranged
immigrant who chants the film’s title, then at sea with the illegal immigrants,
later on land at the centro di accoglienza, and finally when he leaves home to
find Alina in the immigrant encampment, Sandro resembles a fairy tale hero
in that he experiences adventures without his parents.
The fairy tale is especially pertinent to our understanding of the
phenomenon of children’s suffering in Salvatores’s and Giordana’s films for
it allows the young reader to imagine himself or herself negotiating a world
filled with danger and potential violence along with the tale’s protagonist. As
Bettelheim has pointed out, the fairy tale provides a young reader with the
opportunity to confront the fears that inhabit the subconscious. In the world
of the fairy tale the child typically faces these challenges alone, like Michele
and Sandro, without the support of the parents who are either dead or absent.
In this way the fairy tale, with its emphasis on the evil surrounding the young
protagonist, empowers the young reader to confront, and ultimately defeat,
the things which he or she so fears. Fairy tales also address the child’s
anxieties and violent fantasies. These stories, unlike well-meaning but
protective parents in the dominant culture, allow children to confront their
fears as a way of recognizing the dark side of life. The success of the
protagonist’s struggle allows the young reader to imagine triumphing against
seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Michele and Sandro make pilgrimages
of redemption through frightening and unknown territory in order to save
their friends. Both boys exhibit tremendous bravery at the end of their tales,
as Michele reaches out to his father as he points his gun at him, and Sandro
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seeks to extricate Alina from her world of degradation. They have conquered
their fear of all things strange and frightening, evidencing tremendous growth
from the beginning to the end of the film. The titles of Salvatores’s and
Giordana’s films reflect this growth: Sandro finally understands the meaning
of the old man’s incomprehensible rant (“Soki obotami okoki komibomba
lisusu te”) from an illegal African immigrant, and Michele learns not to be
afraid of the dark and of the eccentric Melichetti’s farm when he sets off to
save Filippo from being executed.
Bettelheim contends that the fairy tale also provides the child with “a moral
education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys to him the
advantages of moral behavior, not through abstract ethical concepts but
through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful to him”
(5). That trauma that Michele and Sandro experience without their parents,
and often times, in opposition to, or in the hands of, their parents, ultimately
leads them to a sense of truth and understanding they could not have
imagined beforehand.
Both films focus on friendships between young people, one privileged, one
not. These friendships, however fleeting, establish a bond that signifies hope
for the resolution of serious problems facing Italy. In the course of each
film’s narrative, the notion of privilege is reversed. Just as Michele makes
friends with Filippo, the kidnapped boy, so does Sandro befriend Alina and
Radu. In Io non ho paura, the wealthy northerner is a prisoner while the poor
southerner wields the power to liberate the captive boy. This inverted
relationship serves perhaps as a way of addressing the inherent inequities
between the north and south of Italy. In Quando sei nato non puoi più
nasconderti, the same phenomenon is at play; the wealthy northerner is saved
from drowning and protected from the evil scafisti by the illegal Romanian
immigrant. Despite their differences, these children peacefully co-exist in a
society of their own creation. The bond between Michele and Filippo, which
transcends the blood ties initially imagined by Michele, suggests a
rapprochement between north and south, rich and poor, educated and
uneducated while Sandro’s relationship with Alina conveys hope that Italy
will find a way to accommodate humanely the boatpeople arriving on its
shore. In this way friendship between children, not family, offers hope for the
resolution of some of society’s most pressing problems.
Whereas Salvatores’s Io non ho paura and Giordana’s Quando sei nato non
puoi più nasconderti focus on the child’s perspective, Ozpetek’s Un giorno
perfetto (2008) tells the tale from an adult’s point of view. This shift in
narrative perspective results in dire consequences for the child protagonists in
my reading. Ozpetek, in his earlier film, Cuore sacro (2005), symbolically
represents the notion of sacrifice of youth for adult self-realization. In that
film, the death of Benny, a young woman who steals in order to help the
disadvantaged, compels the older female protagonist, Irene, to leave her highpowered job and achieve her dream of helping others. The narrative of Un
giorno perfetto is essentially a darker tale for it attempts to unravel the events
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leading to a desperate act of murder/suicide to which Ozpetek refers
obliquely in the opening scene. Although the children in this film, Kevin and
Valentina, play important roles in the narrative, the viewer does not see
events through them. By privileging the adult rather than juvenile perspective
in this film, Ozpetek underscores the fact that this film is about adult
introspection, or the lack thereof,
Un giorno perfetto is one of several contemporary films that highlight the
poignant reversal of roles in which a child’s well being, instead of that of his
or her parents, is sacrificed. Sergio Castellitto’s adaptation of Margaret
Mazzantini’s 2001 prize-winning novel Non ti muovere (2004), recounts a
father’s musing on an extramarital affair while his daughter undergoes brain
surgery. Kim Rossi Stuart’s Anche libero va bene (2006) demonstrates the
emotional toll that a parent’s instability has on children in much the same
way that Un giorno perfetto reveals how an estranged husband’s stress
proves ultimately fatal to his children. Paolo Virzí’s La prima cosa bella
(2010) also examines the lasting effects that parental discord has on children
of divorce. These modern representations of children echo the neorealist
thematic of role reversal of parent and child in which children take care of,
not receive care from, parents. In DeSica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948), the
child Bruno assumes adult responsibilities in the desperate years of
unemployment and hunger in the postwar period. Yet, as Un giorno perfetto
demonstrates, the results of this reversal in twenty-first century depictions are
far more dramatic and painful.
Un giorno perfetto (2008) features children who will not live to tell their
tale. The film opens as police enter an apartment; the rest of the film is a
flashback that attempts to explain an estranged husband’s homicidal and
suicidal rampage7. Un giorno perfetto is anything but what its title, taken
from the eponymous 2005 novel by Melania Mazzucco, suggests. Elio,
desperate to reconcile with his family after an acrimonious separation, stalks
and hounds his wife Emma throughout the film. In one especially terrifying
scene, he even kidnaps and tries to rape her. Ultimately the unstable husband
takes out his frustration at the broken marriage by killing his children Kevin
and Valentina, then turning the gun on himself. The rawness of emotion,
rage, and mental instability reveal Elio as a figure of the transformation of
love into hatred and of affection into violence. Ozpetek’s sensuous rendering
of Rome, with exquisite shots of the façade of the Chiesa di Sant’Andrea
della Valle, squarely locates the emotional chaos of the family’s life in the
heart of this beautiful but troubled nation.
Un giorno perfetto, like Amelio’s Ladro di bambini, presents a neoneorealistic portrayal of children. It is precisely this rendition and
appreciation of the ordinary – the trials and tribulations faced by Kevin and
Valentina, such as bullying at school and adolescent sexual attraction –
combined with the increasingly common setting of the broken home – that
makes the ending unbearably sad. (We note that despite the violence of
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kidnapping and horror of apparent drowning, the couples in Salvatores’s and
Giordana’s films stay together.) Divorce is on the rise in Italy, with requests
for legal separation and divorce clogging the Italian courts8. Thus, the Italian
family that in 2001 Paul Ginsborg found extraordinarily strong, with one of
the lowest rates in Europe of divorce and children born out of wedlock (68),
appears in crisis. Contemporary films suggest that parents’ interpersonal
problems, which divert attention from their children and towards themselves,
result in tragic consequences for the children. The children’s violent death,
however elliptically rendered by Ozpetek’s camera, is perhaps the singularly
most shocking scene in recent Italian film.
In the United States critics recently have identified a new literary genre,
coined “the endangered or ruined child” by Ginia Bellafante in her article
about the bestselling author Jodi Picoult. Thus the Italian babyboomer
directors’ penchant for suffering children resonates as well in American
popular culture where the plight of children is portrayed as a personal
tragedy, not as a vehicle for examining larger issues such as immigration or
terrorism. Bellafante points out that terrible things happen to middle-class
children in Picoult’s novels. My Sister’s Keeper (Cassavetes, 2009), the
cinematic adaptation of a novel that recounts the tale of parents who conceive
a child so that their gravely ill teenager may survive, sanitizes the
overwhelming violence of the novel. According to Bellafante, the child in
jeopardy ironically emerges from our inability to protect our children from all
possible evil. In addition to the miseries visited upon children on television as
well as in novels, horrific violence awaits them in recent films based on the
works of Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, 2003; Gone Baby Gone, 2007), Tom
Perotta (Little Children, 2006), and Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones, 2009).
Bellafante links the growth of children-in-peril literature (and its
representation in other media) with a rising judicial tendency to regard
children as particularly vulnerable victims. She articulates the purpose of
“ugliness” against children as “a reflection of our collectively sublimated
ambivalence about having children to begin with” (37). Indeed, children
appear to be mere vehicles for the expression of their parents’ anxiety; the
tragic repercussions of this phenomenon are represented by myriad fictional
cases on television and in film.
Author Michael Chabon laments that modern society precludes children
from experiencing adventure. Considering the statistics, he believes the fear
of abduction of children in the United States is irrational (18). Yet fear
triumphs and thus modern American children no longer enjoy the freedom
once associated with childhood (which Michele experienced in 1970s Acqua
Traverse and Sandro enjoyed in his native Brescia in the new millennium)
because of their anxious parents’ over-protectiveness. Chabon notes that:
“The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at lest
some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has
in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the
neighbors” (18). Sadly, the world of fantasy and imagination, crucial for the
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exploration of self and social problems in Italian films, is not available to
today’s American children.
Italian films of the twenty-first century that feature children offer
conflicting messages of hope and despair. They are certainly not for the faint
of heart. A father shoots his own son at the end of Io non ho paura, intending
to kill the child whom he and others had kidnapped for a ransom. Another
father commits suicide after murdering his two young children in Un giorno
perfetto. In a striking parallel with the ending of Amelio’s Ladro di bambini
(1992), at the end of Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti, young
Sandro, and his new friend, Alina, sit on the curb outside her makeshift
boudoir uncertain of what, if anything, they will do next. Despite the
depressing outcomes of these films, there is reason to hope that children who
experience evil in their society will manage to triumph. In films such as
Salvatores’s Io non ho paura and Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più
nasconderti, children come to understand their own world, as well as
themselves, by interpreting narratives in a fantastic context that brims with
abandonment, omnipresent evil, violence and the threat of death. In the end,
children like Michele and Sandro confront their darkest fears; a new moral
awareness of themselves and the world awakens in them. Their pain and
suffering enlighten them, and perhaps other members of the society as well,
about pressing societal concerns. When children die in the course of the
narrative, like Kevin and Valentina in Un giorno perfetto, they act as pawns
in the solipsistic world of adults who reverse the natural order of the species.
Instead of protecting their children, these adults cause them to suffer for their
own personal development. There is no resolution in these cases as hope for
the future vanishes with the death of the children.
__________
NOTES
1
This phenomenon begins before the new millennium: Gianni Amelio’s
Ladro di bambini (1992) shows children as victims of adults. In this film, a
mother prostitutes her daughter and various other people, from nuns to
relatives of the carabiniere who escorts the children to Sicily, refuse to help.
The very institutions that should support abused children, such as orphanages
and the church, instead shun them. In this way the hapless children remind
viewers of Antonio whose serial misfortune unfolds in Ladri di biciclette
(1948) the film to which Amelio’s title alludes.
2
The law targeted kidnapping gangs, the likes of which were famously
responsible for the 1973 abduction of John Paul Getty III, grandson of the oil
tycoon, whose right ear was removed and mailed to an Italian newspaper.
From 1969 to 1998 there were 691 reported kidnappings with 80 victims
killed. Ransom was paid for 372 of the 479 hostages released (Bohlen).
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3
The sustained increase in illegal immigration resulted in a highly
controversial law, Legge 94, enacted in July 2009, article 19 of which
outlines the penalties for illegal entry and residence by migrants. Giordana’s
film reflects the reality of tens of thousands of boatpeople who attempt to
reach Italy each year by flimsy watercraft typically operated by profiteers
with little interest in their clients’ safety. For a review of these losses at sea
resulting from this unsafe mode of entry see la Repubblica.
4
In Giordana’s first ending, which was, according to him, much more
conclusive and moralistic, Alina shoots and kills Radu who happens to enter
her lair when Sandro is visiting. In the end he decided to opt for the more
open-ended (dare we say neorealist?) finale because that one “… non aveva
la forza dell’altro, la sua struggente energia, anche se molto lontana dallo
stereotipo dell’happy end hollywoodiano. È un finale aperto, che rilancia tutti
gli interrogativi del film, che ci dice: bene, questi ragazzi sono arrivati qui,
adesso tocca a noi. Da soli non ce la possono fare” (Giordana, 13).
5
Ozpetek’s decision to cast an immigrant from the Congo who spoke a
different African language resulted in the change in the name that is chanted:
“Soki obotami okoki komibomba lisusu te…” (Giordana, 72).
6
A similar phenomenon occurs in the initial sequence of Amelio’s Ladro di
bambini when Rosetta whispers a lullaby while watching TV as she waits in
the bedroom for her middle-aged client. The refrain serves as an incantation
against the evils of child prostitution.
7
Perhaps the cinematic precursor to this scene can be found in the vignette in
Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960) in which the intellectual Steiner, a friend and
mentor to the protagonist Marcello, kills his angelic children before
committing suicide.
8
Il sole 24 Ore reported on February 15, 2010 that one third of marriages
end up in divorce court, with an average wait of seven years for a final decree
(1).
WORKS CITED
Ainis, Michele. “Un terzo dei matrimoni finisce male in tribunale”, Il Sole
24 Ore, 15 February 2010, p. 1.
Bellafante, Ginia. “The Anxious Parent: What Do the Novels of Jodi Picoult
– and Our Obsession with Child-Peril Lit – Tell Us about How We Really
Feel about Raising Kids?” The New York Times Magazine, June 21,
2009, pp. 35-37.
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and
Importance of Fairy Tales, New York: Knopf, 1976.
Bohlen, Celeste. “Italian Ban on Paying Kidnappers Stirs Anger”, The New
York Times, February 1, 1998,
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