Small Body (2021)

Compelling study of a journey of spiritual redemption - Small Body review by PD

This debut feature from Laura Samani is a hard watch at times, but compelling viewing nevertheless. Agata (beautifully played by Celeste Cescutti) is a young woman who gives birth to a stillborn child on the coast of Veneto in North East Italy in a deeply religious community where the priest emphatically states that the unbaptised baby is now in limbo where she will stay for eternity. The year is nominally 1900 but with their tradition the fishing village could just as easily be in the Middle Ages; Agata only given hope when she is told of a sanctuary in the mountains where unbaptised babies are briefly and miraculously brought back to life for one breath – time enough, given this mentality, for the baby to be baptised and thus saved.

The film has the rooted magic of a folktale as Agata straps the small coffin to her back and sets off on her epic journey to the mountains in the north, where she is joined by Lynx (Ondina Quadri), who becomes an unlikely companion and whose story also gets woven into the action (if less successfully). Samani and her co-writers use Friulian dialect throughout, a language that can change from one village to the next; these are lives for the most part lived in one place and deeply connected to the land or in Agata’s case the sea, something Lynx has never seen, whilst Agata is in a world she barely understands. Cinematographer Mitja Licen’s camera follows close at Agata’s heels for the beginning of the journey but as it goes on the movement widens to include the landscape and the film takes on a genuine sense of grandeur when the mountains finally loom into the frame. A sequence where their journey takes us under a mountain sees Luca Bertolin’s sound design come to the fore as underground winds blow through the tunnels, whilst composer Fredrika Stahl, using folk songs to great effect, provides a score that becomes increasingly beautiful as the film goes on and is a reminder of a time when the only culture available was music you made yourself. It is ultimately a film about a personal grief which gradually, step by step, takes on a mythic resonance, and the last twenty minutes are truly astonishing. Very powerful stuff indeed.