Adult Beginners

My Mirror column:

Two beautifully crafted European films – Summer 1993 and A Ciambra – offer delicate but substantive insights into how childhood flows into adulthood.

The six-year-old protagonist of Carla Simón’s affecting, unusual debut Summer 1993 has a ‘baby’, a doll she is often seen holding in the early scenes. Later, we see a statue of the Virgin Mary in an alcove, holding Jesus in exactly the same way as Frida cradles her doll.

Obviously, that’s not true. It’s the other way around.

Watching Summer 1993 alongside Jonas Carpignano’s superb second feature A Ciambra, both beautifully crafted recent films from Europe, I found myself thinking about children and how they learn to become adults. All learning begins, at the most fundamental level, with mimicry. So there is much to be learnt from observing children, and then working backwards to observe what they observe – and eventually absorb – from adults around them.

Summer 1993 is about an orphaned child’s first summer without her mother. That summary probably seems maudlin, and the film does make Frida’s disorientation and bewilderment palpable. But Simón draws on her own memories to produce a cinematic experience that’s tender, delicate and radiant with detail – never sentimental.

The figure of the absent mother is everywhere – in the crook of Frida’s doll-cradling arm, but also in Frida’s playacting games with her baby cousin Anna, where Anna is the ‘child’ to Frida’s ‘mummy’. The signifiers of adulthood are both hilariously general and heartbreakingly specific: Frida paints her cheeks with lipstick and puts on sunglasses, but she also lies about on a sofa and refuses to play with ‘her daughter’ Anna because she feels “sore all over”.

One of the ways Simón makes sure that the film does not become a one dimensional portrait of victimhood is to go beyond the ‘poor child’ tenor adopted by Frida’s well-meaning, affectionate but perhaps misguided grandparents. While the camera takes the child’s eye view of much that is vivid or baffling to Frida about the adult world – a firework-fuelled Barcelona neighbourhood as it grows more distant from a car window, a chicken being chopped – it does not shy away from Frida’s attention-seeking, sometimes at the cost of Anna. A child not brought up to watch out for a younger one can swiftly become a danger to her. Because if Frida takes her cues from the adults, then Anna takes at least some of her cues from Frida – and as Frida shows off her semblance of adultness, she deliberately lets Anna compete at things she has no chance of achieving.


The atmospheric, wonderfully acted A Ciambra is also about a child thrown in at the deep end. Carpignano’s young Roma protagonist Pio (Pio Amato, one of an exceptional cast of non-actors) finds himself handling a family crisis when his elder brother is thrown into jail. At fourteen, Pio is of course much older than Anna – on the cusp of adulthood. But what Carpignano does masterfully is to show how complicated it is to be on that cusp: young enough to be ordered around at home by his harried grandmother, and to want to hide his face in her lap – but also, in his own head, old enough to slip out of his house at night to conduct solo deals.

Much of the film’s visual shock value – and later its most heart-wrenching moments – derive their power from the fact that Pio still looks like a child, even as he smokes and drinks and generally tries his hardest to act like a man. Carpignano is clearly deeply invested in his very particular setting – a real-life Roma family living off petty illegalities on the outskirts of Gioia Tauro, a small southern Italian port city known for drug deals and organised crime – and he immerses us in it powerfully enough to see how hard it is for its inhabitants to imagine a world beyond it. There are other communities in this world, but their otherness is evoked right from the raucous opening family dinner scene, where someone says “We’re eating like the Italians” and later someone else: “You’re drunk like the Africans”. Here, too, the succession from adults to children, of how an approach to the world gets passed down through generations, is key. In one astutely underplayed scene, Pio’s ancient grandfather says to him about a cart lying in the garage: “I was born in that thing.” And then, “We were always on the road. Answerable to no one. It was us against the world. Remember. Against the world.”

The grandfather dies soon after, and the death brings the family’s men out of jail faster than originally slotted. It also puts paid to Pio’s fumbling, half-understood attempt at forging solidarities outside the community he was born into. In what is perhaps the only rupturing of the film’s observational realist style, a dreamlike silver horse that appeared in an early scene featuring the youthful grandfather appears to Pio – a symbolic vision of escape that might now forever stay a dream.

Perhaps that, in the end, is the difference between acting grown-up and actually becoming grown-up: adulthood makes sure you know that a dream is only a dream.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 8 April 2018.