THE STORY – Jasmine is 40 and has everything she ever wanted: a devoted husband, three loving sons, and a thriving hair salon just south of Naples. But after her father’s death, she experiences a recurring dream in which a young girl runs into her arms, offering Jasmine a new sense of fulfillment and completeness she can’t ignore. She decides to follow her dream of a daughter and dives headfirst into the challenging world of international adoption – risking her marriage, her son’s well-being, and her own moral compass along the way. The entire family is in crisis until they finally realize that the only way out is together.
THE CAST – Marilena Amato, Gennaro Scarica, Vincenzo Scarica & Anna Amato
THE TEAM – Alessandro Cassigoli & Casey Kauffman (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 80 Minutes
The word ‘confusing’ is often thrown around about films with unclear, mythically-inclined narratives. The works of David Lynch are surreal and absurd enough that now anything of that nature is described as “Lynchian.” Still, Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman’s feature film “Vittoria” can be called confusing under completely different parameters: its mere existence is a baffling concept. As human beings, we have an intrinsic survival instinct, while in American law, there is even the right to “plead the fifth” or the right to avoid self-incrimination. The way “Vittoria” seems to implicate the playing-themselves protagonists makes the film come across like a horrifying letter of confession, their flaws and sins of selfishness laid bare for audiences but presented like a crowning glory.
“Vittoria” opens in Napoli, with blonde undercut-sporting hairdresser Jasmine (Marilena Amato, playing herself) at a tarot reading. Frustrated by the fortune teller who tells her that there are no future kids to be had – she has three sons already – she demands another reading. “What do you want me to tell you?” snaps out from the tarot card-shuffling woman. Jasmine then tells her and the audience that she had dreamt of having a daughter. With a trio of sons already in hand, a loving husband, Rino (Gennaro Scarica, himself), and a life that appears more than content, Jasmine cleaves her life in two by announcing her plan to adopt a girl internationally. The second act of “Vittoria” is her persuading, cajoling, and guilt-tripping her family, occasionally using the death of her father from cancer as a reason to let her travel from Italy to Eastern Europe so she can adopt a young girl solely on the whimsical idea of forced tarot and nocturnal visions. The third act is what they describe in the press release as her “risking her moral compass”.
This moral compass they indicate is how Jasmine – it must be reinforced here that Jasmine is a pseudonym, so everything Marilena does is a reconstruction of her own experience – must “get over” the notion that this young girl she wishes to adopt has speech and cognitive issues. The line “I knew she had a speech delay but not a cognitive delay” reinforces how this character (and if an accurate reenactment, Marilena herself) is not a good person, who in actuality, should not be allowed to adopt this girl just to fuel what comes across in the performance as a complete ego trip. Not to say that the film presents no moments of softness for Jasmine; she conducts free salon appointments for the elderly, and her tête-à-tête with eldest son Vincenzo (Vincenzo Scarica) is a sweet scene as he is following her hairdresser lead. We should see that abrasive outer shell fall away, but it returns all too quickly to this unviable objective of a “missing” daughter from her life.
None more so than when the film builds to a crescendo of frustration, where the young girl with learning difficulties is admonished by Jasmine and the people around her for not being able to draw a circle – the film presents this as if she can draw a circle she is mentally proficient enough to be adopted – only for Rino, who up to this point had been barely cooperating with Jasmine’s daughter fantasy, to reach down and rescue the girl from a barrage of tongues. Gennaro Scarica, as Rino comes out unscathed here, is an independent carpenter with books full of work whose stoic masculinity is breached by a young boy with a ball. He is also the only character with any journey, as his swoop into a foray of shouting Italian and Eastern European characters marks the dissolution of his apathy.
Directors Kauffman and Cassigoli chanced upon the story of Marilna and her journey to adoption while filming their previous work, “Californie,” in 2020 and wanted to tell her story. But this misfire does not come from that singular choice, but in how Marilena and the people behind the true story allowed themselves – literally – to be shown in this way. It makes the film beyond perplexing. Had “Vittoria” offered up their tirade to adoption as something complex rather than the selfish whims of a woman whose eldest son is leaving the nest, it might have come across as an honest rendering of our moral shortcomings.
But Vittoria is Italian for ‘victory,’ and the slow motion, the freeze-frame ending of the young girl in her parents’ arms makes the film feel more like a vanity project, a triumphant battle of ego that Jasmine won. She adopted the girl and beat her family to have her dream fulfilled, but when we start equating the safety of orphan children with prizes to be won, we lose a bit of our humanity. “Vittoria,” with its overbearing score from Giampá, pulls so hard on the heartstrings of humanity that it unravels, leaving its ventricles barren and its soul faded. A work of fiction that perhaps should have just been a classically structured documentary. But whether this docu-fiction approach worked or not, “Vittoria” is something that would have been better off staying in its lane as a post on Marilena’s Instagram – heck, the real photos of the family looking happy that play over the credits would be a good start.
