A Disturbing But Moving Story of a Child's Forced Maturation

lawprof

[See IMDb main page for this movie for cast credits-none are known outside Italy]

"I'm Not Spoiled" has enjoyed enormous European success and is being screened at art cinemas in the U.S.  Shot in a bleak and desolate part of Italy where tourists are never expected, this story of a family thirty or so years ago is seductively engrossing.  All is not what it seems.  There is both mystery and madness.

Michele, a young boy about ten or so years old, plays with his sister and a small group of friends in empty fields and among ruins of once well-maintained farm houses, now mute ruins.  There is no town as such and the only store seems to have few goods or customers.

Michele's father returns from somewhere and he's both loving and hectoring, bestowing presents and admonitions and allowing the two little kids to beat him in arm wrestling.  He appears to be a fairly typical Italian paterfamilias, a nice guy.  Mom is likable too.

Exploring a vacant, decrepit house Michele discovers a chained and brutalized boy his own age.  Confined to a hole in the ground and blinded by any sunlight, the child is clearly a victim of some awful crime.  Michele provides sustenance for the kid but makes no effort to alert anyone to the boy's predicament.  And that's fortunate because the balance of the film deals with Michele's growing understanding of why and how this angelic-appearing child in white has been kidnapped and chained in a dank hole.

Michele makes a slow journey to a reluctant and frightened maturity as he begins to understand what is going on.  As with so many children, he recognizes that grownups upon whom he depends may be more than they seem to be and much of what they are isn't very nice.

The acting, especially by the two young boys and Michele's sister, is convincingly real, free of affect.  Much of the cinematography emphasizes the loneliness of a bypassed-by-prosperity region but the director, unfortunately, succumbed to some mannerized filming. Closeups of small field creatures are shots which add nothing to the story and inject a contrived artificiality.

Not many films successfully center a mysterious and terrifying predicament as a way of exploring children's emotional lives. "I'm Not Scared" does.

8/10

score /10

lawprof 16 April 2004

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0885383/