‘Vittoria’: Venice Review

Dirs: Alessandro Cassigoli, Casey Kauffman. Italy. 2024. 80 mins.

Directing duo Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman are on their third film set in the tough port town of Torre Annunziata, south of Naples. Each one has been born from the rib of its predecessor. Docudrama Californie (2021) was the scripted story of a pre-adolescent Moroccan-Italian girl the directors met while making the 2018 female boxing documentary Butterfly. Now the pair return with a story that casts in its central role a hairdresser they encountered during the filming of Californie.

Builds to a moving lump-in-the-throat finale

We first see Marilena Amato’s character Jasmine as she’s having her fortune read by a tarot card reader. A cine-verité feel is established from the get-go that is partly explained in the final credits, when the actress is credited as Marilena ‘Jasmine’ Amato. You don’t need to read anything about the making of the film beforehand (and probably shouldn’t) to sense that all the actors are non-professionals, and that not every scene may be entirely scripted. The dramatic current thus generated lends depth and nuance to what is on the surface a fairly simple story about a headstrong woman’s desire to adopt the daughter she was never blessed with. 

Grounded in the dusty streets of a sprawling working-class town famous for pasta and heavy industry, Vittoria is an emotional pressure cooker that builds to a moving lump-in-the-throat finale, an intensely human drama given heft by a rich soundtrack that might have blown in from a bigger studio film. Easily the most marketable of the directing duo’s three Torre Annunziata films to date – despite the subtitles that will be required even in most of Italy, given the characters’ impenetrable dialect – it could tempt arthouse distributors in more than a few territories after further festival play.

With her punkish undercut dyed blonde hair, tattoed lipliner and flashy-trashy fashion choices, Jasmine is clearly a feisty woman of the people: but she’s smart and independent with it, running her own hair salon, while making time for things she cares about – the old ladies in a care home whose hair, we presume, she does for free, and her family. Husband Rino (Gennaro Scarica) is a carpenter with a one-man business that’s never short of work – in fact he’s thinking of opening a second workshop on the island of Capri. There’s clear affection between the couple, though they don’t express it effusively: in fact Jasmine seems closer to her eldest son Vincenzo (Vincenzo Scarica), a sensitive young man in his early twenties who is following in his mother’s footsteps as a hairdresser.

Jasmine’s other two school-age sons seem rather in awe of their mother: we learn a lot about her, and her relationship with them, when she is so busy killing bad guys she refuses to give up the TV game console to her middle son.

There is a vulnerability behind Jasmine’s tough Neapolitan street-girl exterior, however, that comes through in her initial reluctance to act on, or even give words to, her dream of adding a daughter to the family. And it is literally a dream that has been disturbing her sleep – one that involves a little blonde girl and the hairdresser’s dead father, who contracted cancer from the asbestos dust he inhaled while working in a local steel plant.  But this is also a film about a marriage. Rino is the dark horse of the story, a gruff man of few words who can’t understand his wife’s daughter obsession. He backs her up with the utmost resistance (we sense here an old relationship, perhaps going back as far as high school, that is being stress-tested by a shift in the dynamics). By the end, however, Rino will turn out to be something of a bedrock.

Although Vittoria is grounded in an intensely real place, there is a more than a touch of the fable about a story which is scripted with admirable efficiency, one in which single scenes speak volumes. We’re in the here and now, but Torre Annunziata is presented as a mosaic of confusing fragments – hair salon, cemetery, family home, religious procession, Napoli soccer fan celebration, container port, abandoned factory. Behind is the volcano, a menacing presence brought out in a conversation about evacuation plans in the event of a Vesuvian eruption. Towards the end, Jasmine and Rino will travel together to a land of snow and ice. Californie so impressed Italian auteur Nanni Moretti that he stepped into produce Vittoria – which can only help attract more admirers to this creative team.