ITALIAN FILM FESTIVAL: Writer-director Antonio Capuano seems to be to Naples what Robert Guediguian is to Marseilles, a specialist in socially conscious dramas set in his Mediterranean hometown, and in Dark Love he examines the gnarled issue of rape.
The most immediately notable thing about the film is that Capuano is not interested in the rape itself, only the aftermath for the teenage victim and one of her assaulters – the only one to go down for the crime.
In a deliberately gaudy opening sequence, it’s summer in Naples and a group of teenage boys sunbathe and muck around at the beach, diving from rocks and drinking in the sight of undressed bodies, both male and female. In the evening they get drunk and engage in hijinks, running noisily through town on scooters till they spot Irene (Irene De Angelis), a teenage girl making out in a car with her boyfriend. When the girl is on her way home they surround her and drag her into a lock-up. All we see or hear of what follows is a resonant symbol: one of her stiletto shoes, lost in the struggle and now lying on the ground like a twisted inversion of Cinderella’s slipper.
From here we separately follow the twin stories of raped and rapist: Irene, living with her well-to-do parents in their luxurious home overlooking the Bay of Naples, and Ciro (Gabriele Agrio), incarcerated for her rape in a juvenile detention centre located atop a picturesque Neapolitan promontory, ironically within view of Irene’s cliff-top home.
Both are clearly unhappy and turning to artistic pursuits in attempts to get over the incident that has blighted their lives. Having retreated into herself, the taciturn Irene is attempting to re-engage with the world by taking acting classes, while the introverted Ciro sketches energetically in exercise books before turning to poetry. In one poem that he reads in front of a prison workshop, he appears to take the point of his victim.
This section of the film lacks energy, so when Ciro starts writing a letter to his victim, the film seems about to shift up through the gears. Indeed for a while it does. Irene, initially upset over the letter, tears it to shreds, but later has a change of heart. She decides to contact the young man who has helped turn her life to crap.
Capuano has set up the structure for a powerful story that is sensitive to the plight of both victim and her victimiser, the latter apparently a loner who carries a heavy sense of remorse for allowing himself to be carried away by peer group pressure. Where that might sound as if it suggests a moral equivalence between the assaulted woman and her attacker, that’s not the way it plays out. It’s never less than clear that Ciro carries the burden of his own wrongdoing and never seeks to shift blame onto the woman. There’s none of the usual excuses of 'she asked for it," or 'she led us on".
As Capuano showed in his powerful 1996 film Pianese Nunzi, Fourteen in May, about an outspoken anti-Mafia priest compromised by his inappropriate relationship with a teenage boy, he’s interested in exploring the complex humanity of morally compromised characters without making excuses for them.
It’s sad, then, that just as Dark Love is getting really interesting, the filmmaker has a failure of nerve (or perhaps an attack of good taste). He obviously wants to leave some space around his characters so we can intuit what they’re thinking rather than being told. All very laudable in theory, but he makes the mistake of expecting us to guess too much, crucially failing to translate more than a tiny and not especially revealing fraction of the pair’s correspondence. The Italian Film Festival program notes call Dark Love 'understated", but underdeveloped might have been more accurate.
