When you wish upon a star…

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest ’24 is in the home stretch! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season.

Our final theatrical release on the list is the Best International Feature nominee Io Capitano. It opened in Chicago and Cincinnati at least a week before its distributor deigned to grace Indianapolis with its presence on the very last weekend of this Oscar season. Its local “Coming Soon” status had been in limbo for weeks, leaving me to seriously consider road-tripping to Cincy for the sake 100% completion of this annual hobby-project. My patience paid off, and some time and gas money were saved.

The other competitors in the Best International Feature category:

• Perfect Days, a Japanese film from a German director
• Society of the Snow, a film about Uruguayans from a Spanish director
• The Teachers’ Lounge, a German film from a director of Turkish descent
• The Zone of Interest, a film set in Nazi Germany from a British director

…and the crowning completion of our cosmopolitan quintet is Io Capitano, an Italian film set almost entirely in Africa. Oscar’s spotlight last shone toward director Matteo Garrone in 2020 with his bizarre rendition of Pinocchio, the one with Roberto Benigni as Geppetto (though he was only in half of it). Once again Garrone presents a frequently grim tale of stubborn youth, poorly informed aspirations, lies that do more harm than good, the consequences of gullibility, harrowing journeys, child victimizers, a coincidental reunion and a climactic brush with death on the high seas. But it’s not exactly the same film. For one thing, we get two Pinocchios. And they can bleed.

This time Italy isn’t the starting line; it’s the finish line in the distance. Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall) are 16-year-old cousins enjoying adequately well-adjusted lives in Dakar, Senegal, who dream of traveling to Europe by any means necessary and becoming world-famous musicians. This is not a period piece — in a world with modern-day cell-phone access where social media superstardom is totally a thing even in Africa, they decide to achieve musical fame the old-fashioned way: by running away from home to someplace they can’t afford or understand, doing their thing, and waiting for magic and fame to happen in that order. They aren’t starving, escaping oppression, or seeking lost loved ones. They’re merely dream chasers with adorable notions of what the path ahead will look like.

The boys save up what they think is lots of money, lie to family one last time, and embark on their fateful road trip. Their only defenses are high hopes and brotherly love. Neither of them turns to the camera and asks, “What’s the worst that could happen?” But the adults can feel that unspoken question and shake their heads at its implied cosmic irony over the next two hours.

With no sign of maps in hand or on their phones (which seemingly vanish awfully early on anyway), Our Heroes trust in every offer of transport and go wherever they’re led. The Indiana Jones red arrow (and there is one, albeit unseen till the end credits) spirits them east through Mali to Niger, then northeast into Libya. Africa shines brightly through the lenses of cinematographer Paolo Carnera (The White Tiger) from an open-air bazaar outside Agadez to the compacted city blocks of Tripoli, and especially all through the formidable Sahara Desert in between, a land of contrasts unto itself. Sand gets in everywhere, but it’s not purely Arrakis end-to-end — we do see one (1) oasis-style palm, and certain duneless parts are drivable to the right maniac for the right price.

They soon learn the hard way Libya is big. Really big. Some parts are deadlier than others. Adults warn them at every step of the way. Sometimes they listen. Sometimes those adults underestimate the pitfalls and things are even worse. Their harrowing quest is a series of ripoffs, bribes, theft, torture, and, worst of all, separation. Corrupt officials and travel profiteers line their own pockets while the path forward is lined with the bodies of those who tried and failed. Meanwhile on the other side of the screen, we cringe every time we see their next misstep coming. We breathe a little at every faint glimmer of new hope, then tense up whenever we sense the next predator around the corner before they do. A more boisterous theatergoer could yell themselves hoarse at the screen like Lil Rel Howery yelling “GET OUT!”

One dream sequence amid the bleak Sahara leg (hint: see poster) confuses matters slightly for any viewer trying to second-guess where Garrone is taking them and us. I worried this might all lead to a non-shocking twist revealing too much of the film was in the boys’ imaginations, like Atonement or Robot Dreams. Far from it — Garrone re-roots us in reality for the rest of the sojourn, most uneasily so in the final leg as we indeed reach every northern African emigrant’s biggest obstacle: the nigh-impassable moat that is the Mediterranean Sea. Anyone who’s kept up on Oscar nominees the past several years may dread this turning into an adaptation of the New Yorker‘s short film “Lifeboat”, a true-life worst case of this precise scenario.

Stepping forward the most stridently, Seyduo Sarr is our front-and-center leading young man here. He and Moussa are a team enduring the sort of roads Crosby and Hope never had to suffer, but after a time it’s Sarr all the way. The camera sticks most closely to his side and his roiling emotional states — the innocence slowly draining away, the anguish through each new challenge, the lowest lows, the luckiest breaks, and onward to journey’s end. He finds himself in a ludicrously untenable position, albeit quite possibly true-to-life considering the way dubious benefactors roll.

Through Seydou the title is explained at long last, the ironic flipside of Captain Phillips‘ catchphrase. The last, lingering shot is all about the kid — the sort of reaction that might swell an audience’s hearts in a more optimistic, inspirational, fanciful, sueprficial film. Alas, only through the magic of cinema can we fool ourselves and choose to hold onto that final image as a happy ending. In this broken world we know what’s coming next and what Garrone knows he doesn’t have to show us, for fear he’ll break our hearts and his own. All things considered, in hindsight we wish the guys had just stayed home and made TikToks.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Foreign films rarely have a wealth of familiar character actors, but a few have reached our screens. The longest resumé belongs to stuntman Affif Ben Badra (Dune: Part Two, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), who’s a pickup-truck chauffeur with the gas and chutzpah to ferry folks across the Sahara, with no patience for stragglers. Hichem Yacoubi, who had a bit part in Spielberg’s Munich, is a shady Libyan who cheerfully arranges large boat rides across the Mediterranean for max profits at minimal risk to himself. Also in the mix is Ibrahima Gueye, who costarred with Sophia Loren in Netflix’s 2020 Oscar-nominated The Life Ahead.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Io Capitano end credits, which are almost entirely in Italian, only a little in English. For some reason the phrase “tax shelter” shows up a lot.