Corpo Celeste (2011)

It's hard to believe that Alice Rohrwacher's Corpo Celeste is her debut film. The medium of film is handled with self-assurance, ease and imagination. The story and the way of telling it avoids the well-trodden path but does not indulge in self-conscious provocation either. One could say that the focus of the film is a community, a community of people in a poor neighboorhood in an Italian city. Marta, a girl who grew up in Switzerland, is about to receive her confirmation. She is bullied by her sister and she takes comfort in the relation to her mother. The church is led by a priest who most of all is eager to collect votes for a politician who favors the church. A volunteer, a middle-aged woman, administrates the catechism classes for the kids. Rohrwacher sticks to Marta's story, but this story is closely knit to the community of which she is a part. Without a trace of cynicism, the film looks at the pretense, but also the care and the fear that these people are shaped by. Marta is seen as an outsider and towards the end of the film, she embraces this role.

The spirit of the Dardenne brothers haunt Corpo celeste. The camera energetically tracks the movements of the main character and there is a subtle assemblage of an urban world with its characteristic sounds and paths. This is by no means a bad thing and I never get the feeling that Rohrwacher is emulating their style. She has her own angle. The transitory and disrupting character of adolescence is treated freshly, without few recourses to reductive images of girlhood or sexuality (but yes, the addition of a scene about Marta getting her period for the first time borders on a problematic hang-up). One could say that Rohrwacher's perceptive images present the complexity of Marta's situation. We get a glimpse of her world when we see what she sees. In a stunning scene, Marta stands on a roof, looking at a group of elderly ladies practicing a song. The rumble of the city surrounds their singing and gives it an eerie shape.

Corpo celeste's rendering of religion remains open-ended. It focuses on the corruption of the church, the frailty of some of its servants along with a surprising take on faith in an urban setting. The church tries to maximize its membership and its appeal: but rather than letting this remain a sign of institutional decline, Rohrwacher portrays very different representatives of the church: the world-weary priest, the crouching volunteer, the powerful bishop and the aging priest who has saved his own unorthodox faith.

Some of the images and ideas of Corpo celeste may be a bit heavy-handed and clunky, but this did not bother me much.  One can complain about the use of religious imagery towards the end of the film (how a person-size crucifix appears in the story as a symbol of the corruption of the church) but these more allegorical elements are integrated in a visual language full of life and ideas.