Hope and fantasy coexist so closely in Io Capitano, Matteo Garrone’s wrenching Oscar-nominated account of the journey of two teenage Senegalese migrants towards a new life in Europe, that you start to wonder if the film is arguing that hope is a fantasy. Whether the better future that tempts 16-year-old Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall) on to the perilous trip across the Sahara and the Mediterranean is no more substantial than the mirage of a floating woman that Seydou hallucinates in the desert. But in fact this is a film that, for all its brutal horrors, keeps a kernel of hope and faith in the inherent decency of humankind (or some of it at least).
Central to the spirit of the film is Seydou, a gangly string bean with a smile that warms the screen; a teenager who is still enough of a child to believe that manhood means never being afraid. It’s a gorgeous, sensitive performance from Sarr. Seydou has a purity and innocence as a character, not because of his rose-tinted naivety, but because throughout the journey, and even as his illusions are systematically shattered, he never loses his selflessness and empathy for the others who share his plight. But if Seydou represents all that is good in humanity, there is no shortage of representatives of the darker side of man – at one point Seydou finds himself separated from his cousin and locked in a Libyan prison run by criminals as a torture facility and extortion factory. But Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman) balances the extreme ugliness of this chapter of the story against cinematography that finds unexpected beauty throughout.
