Asia Argento’s Incompresa is a powerful tale of childhood struggle. While it can come off as a little blunt and even slightly brutal, it is never the less a poignant and heart-wrenching film.
Aria (Giulia Salerno) is a nine-year-old Roman girl caught in the midst of her famous parents’ messy divorce. As plates fly and children laugh and cry around her, Aria struggles to live a “normal” life, ending up moving between houses, smoking with punks and robbing letterboxes.
The story of Aria is one that I’m sure many can relate to. We all know how cruel children (and many adults) can be, and how easy it is for someone to get caught in a spiral of despondence and desperation. Incompresa definitely does not fail to make us feel for Aria. She is the ultimate victim of the story, a starry-eyed youngster thrown against bullying kids, her own feelings for a boy in her class and clashing parents.
The title of the film means “misunderstood”, which is a perfect encapsulation of the whole movie. It is a movie about feeling left out, but also about the difficulty of following one’s own path in the face of a world that demands conformity. Thanks to intuitive shots and a brilliant soundtrack, Incompresa manages to elicit feelings of detachment and loneliness incredibly well. There’s something about it that just leaves you feeling great empathy for Aria.
Where Incompresa fails however, is in its treatment of other characters. Apart from Aria, most of the characters in this film feel simple, one-dimensional and maybe even be a bit childishly written. Her parents are caricatures and the children in her class are stereotypes. It’s almost as if the point of the story is not Aria’s struggle in finding a place among a real group of people, but a struggle against common imaginings of real people.
One of the most important characters in the film is Dac, a black stray cat that Aria adopts and befriends. It is absolutely gut-wrenchingly bitter-sweet to see Aria hug the cat as if it is her last friend in the world. But at the same time, I feel like I can only see it in a critical light. The cat, as with many animals in dramas, is basically an empathy-generating plot device. It’s a cute one, but a device all the same.
Incompresa is brutally sad but, at the same time, moments of black humour do seep through. Scenes like Aria dancing with the punks or releasing a pigeon in her father’s room really tickle the funny bone just because of how sweet they are.
Overall Incompresa could definitely be fleshed out a lot more, but as it stands it is still a film with impact and an aura of originality that makes it stand out.
Incompresa has one final screening on 8 October at 8:45pm.
Reviewed by James Rudd
Rating out of 10: 5
The Lavazza Italian Film Festival runs from 2 – 22 October 2014 exclusively at the Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas.
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