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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), the brown-legged ten-year-old at the center of the stirring Italian movie "I'm Not Scared," is fifty inches tall, and every inch a boy. By that I mean he has a boy's adventurousness and gallantry and a natural sense of the rightness of things. In 1978, in one of the southernmost regions of Italy, Michele is spending a long summer romping in the wheat fields. The other games he plays with the children in the tiny farm town where he lives (it's just a few sun-baked buildings with a flyspecked shop or two) don't do a thing for him, but the golden fields are the purest freedom. The stalks come up to Michele's eyes, and he and the other kids run and roll through them, diving like fish in the sea. But Michele needs more of an adventure. Near an abandoned farmhouse, he pulls back some corrugated tin roofing that's been thrown over a pit, and finds something unaccountable below--a creature asleep under a piece of burlap, living in the pitch black. On Michele's second visit to the pit, this phantom bursts out at him. The director, Gabriele Salvatores, turns the moment into a jolting "Boo!," but the jolt is fair enough, since this shot, like every other in the movie, is meant to put us inside Michele's perceptions and emotions. The creature is...
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