Points: 7
Italian filmmaker Antonio Capuano’s Bagnoli Jungle is a rare bird within the contemporary panorama of Italian filmmaking. It’s by definition a fiction film, yet it incorporates many aspects of real everyday life in a documentary-like manner. And in so doing, it continually blurs the line that separates facts from fiction. Story-wise, it focuses mostly on three individuals: Giggino, Antonio, and Marco, all of them living in the working-class neighbourhood of Bagnoli, in Naples, Italy.
Giggino is a 50-year-old grumpy man, an uninspired poet who recites his verses in bars and restaurants. He is, too, an occasional thief who takes small items such as cell phones and wallets from glove compartments in cars parked on the street. He lives alone in a shabby room at a boarding house and doesn’t seem to have any friends.
Antonio, his father, is 80 and lives in an average-looking apartment. He’s a retired worker of the Italsider factory, now abandoned and fallen to pieces. He can’t help but remember the good old days when his work meant so much to him. But despite today’s less than happy circumstances, he’s found a way to have some enjoyment and earn a bit of money as well: he’s a storyteller of no less than Diego Maradona’s most famous anecdotes when he played for Napoli.
Unlike Giggino, who’s all by himself, Antonio gets help with daily chores from a Ukrainian maid. She is, in fact, an engineer who was unemployed back home and so came to Italy looking for work in her field — which she obviously never found.
And finally there’s Marco, a free spirited good-looking 18-year-old young man who works as an underpaid salesman and a grocery delivery boy. Which he hates. He feels his life is elsewhere, but he has no clue where. One thing is for sure: it’s far from the everyday hardships of the jungle of Bagnoli — as everybody calls it.
These men represent three different generations whose lives sporadically intertwine. In different ways, the three generations are affected by disillusionment, loss of expectations, and an unsatisfying present. Ill-conceived political, social and economic transitions have left thousands in a very unstable situation, with little to hope for.
Capuano manages to expose such a grim reality with both empathy and concern for his characters. It is through the lives of these three men that Capuano addresses the conflicts endured by many of his fellow countrymen. In so doing, he casts his own melancholic meditation on an aching state of things.
Largely shot with a hand-held camera, with just the already available light in locations and settings, briskly edited, and spoken in very colloquial dialogue, Bagnoli Jungle achieves a high degree of gritty realism even in the least unexpected of places. At the same time, sound effects are used for narrative purposes, adding an extra dimension to what images already convey. It’s an interesting mix, to say the least.
Also, street artists, painters, salesmen, migrant workers, rappers, and students mingle at large in the many parts of the neighbourhood. Here again, the fictional stories blend in with these real life scenes. You may wonder how much of what you see on screen is actually scripted and to what degree.
But that’s not the issue here. Instead, what does matter is the impression of reality viewers have. In this sense, Bagnoli Jungle feels very credible from beginning to end. What you see is what you get.
Production notes
Bagnoli Jungle (Italy, 2015) Written and directed by Antonio Capuano. With Antonio Casagrande, Marco Grieco, Luigi Attrice, Angela Pagano, Gea Martire, Olena Kravstskova. Cinematography: Antonio Capuano. Editing: Diego Liguori. Running time: 100 minutes.
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