The Sicilian Girl

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Gripping based-on-fact drama about a woman who stood up to the Sicilian mafia.

A fitting companion to Matteo Garrone's violent but sublimely poetic

Gomorrah

, now in cinemas, this based-on-fact drama is described in an end-title as "a work of imagination freely inspired" by the life and death of its subject. But if director Amenta, who told the same story as a one-hour documentary in 1997, has stretched the facts, he has a vice-like grip on the reality.

Rita Atria was only 17 in November 1991 when she went to see judge Paolo Borsellino and offered to testify against the mafiosi - some of them related to her - in her Sicilian village, who were responsible for the murders of her father and brother.

This then-unprecedented act of betrayal, based on deeds and times and dates meticulously recorded in a decade of her diaries, gave the state key testimony and secured convictions that led to long prison terms. But barely nine months later, she was dead - and by the most unexpected of means.

Amenta's tight, precise script spurns the conventional pieties and spares us a Joan-of-Arc-style heroine engaged on a fearless crusade for justice. Indeed Atria (D'Agostino), whom we first meet as a sweet child and the apple of her father's eye, grows into a stroppy, even graceless, adult who isn't trying to charm anyone: an impulsive hot-head, twisted by rage and grief, she makes it plain that she only wants to help the judge so she can get her own revenge.

In the process of learning the distinction between vendetta and justice, she has to face up to some unsavoury facts from her own past. But as she is disowned, first by her own mother, and gradually by all her friends, the film does a fine job of depicting her chilling isolation and the claustrophobic sense of the net closing around her.

The judge, Borsellino (Jugnot, the Frenchman who directed himself in the excellent

Monsieur Batignole

a few years back) is likewise a plausible three-dimensional character rather than a valiant judicial hero: his teenage daughter hates him and his wife's support is shaky at best. And the film splendidly evokes its setting, in particular the insularity of Sicilian society and its resentment towards the "foreigners" from Rome. It's gritty and dramatic but classy

and finally almost transcendent. Like the film about Sophie Scholl a few years ago, it is a fitting tribute to a brave woman. Recommended.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Veronica D'Agostino, Gerard Jugnot

Director:

Marco Amenta

Running time:

105 mins

Rating:

M (contains violence, offensive language and sex scenes) In Italian and Sicilian with English subtitles