Terraferma is a sweet film that wears its heart on its sleeve. Illegal immigrant boats are turning up in the seas off a Sicilian island, Linosa, and the locals are trapped between their core, humanistic values of respect for any life and those of the nation, which doesn't want to welcome the illegals any way. The state, in the form of the police, persecutes Filippo and his grandfather Ernesto for plucking nearly-dead refugees from the sea, among them a pregnant woman near delivery. The woman has her child at Filippo’s house shortly after she’s rescued and eventually wins over Filippo’s mother, the pragmatic sceptic Giulietta. These circumstances sum up the ethics of the film as Terraferma stacks the deck against the state in an almost melodramatic way.
Director Emanuele Crialese also gets some mileage out of the tacky tourism that many in Linosa seem bent on selling their hearts to. Filippo’s uncle wants to pretend the refugees don’t exist so he can continue to make money by taking drunken tourist parties out on his boat so they can have a good time. One effective device in the film contrasts his boat crammed with tourists waving in celebration of music with a similar shot of refugees waiving from their overcrowded raft. Other shots contrast the spreading of a fishing net from an underwater angle with an underwater angle shot of drunk tourists diving into the water. It’s all clear if a little obvious.
The ethical examination in the film centers on Fillipo. This cute, unsophisticated, 20-year-old accepts his grandfather’s humanism until their ship is confiscated by the police because they had pulled struggling refugees out of the sea. The youth then decides to follow the law rather than his personal code and, in one of the most effective scenes of the film, he beats away a refugee group that tries to cling to his small boat, and motors off into the night. The next day at the beach, he sees the horror of the refugees’ suffering and death as they wash up on the beach. Realizing that his actions have contributed to this pain, Filippo re-embraces his humanism and helps the Ethiopian woman and her children off the island and on to Italy. While the film invites us to follow Filippo’s character arc as the center of the questions at play in Terraferma, the wholesome actor at this center, Filippo Pucillo, unfortunately can’t quite engage us. We don’t see nuance in this performance, and we don’t have a sense for the flow of the stages of his moral evolution as he moves through them. A professional actor might have been able to carry us through all the forces at play in Filippo’s life and thus sold the pounding message in the film, but Pucillo isn’t able to do this.
Ultimately, Terraferma feels heavy-handed. Well-intentioned, but heavy-handed. The film offers some nice cinematic moments and has some merit because of these, but it could have been a much more effective movie.
