Stolen Children.

The rich but subtle theatricality of Gianni Amelio's Open Doors, with its beautifully autumnal cinematography and the great performance of Gian Maria Volante, helped make it the finest film released in this country in 1991. Amelio's latest, Stolen Children, isn't on the same artistic plane but it sustains my admiration for its creator in two ways. First, this fine movie is further proof that Amefio is a tough-minded humanist who asks disturbing questions about the sometimes monstrous interaction of society and the individual. Second, Stolen Children has been made in a completely different style from Open Doors and this isn't just a case of aesthetic restlessness. Open Doors was basically a political thriller and required a solid plot, suspenserut rhythms, menace-laden dialogue, and juicy characterizations by seasoned players. But since Stolen Children is a nearly plotless account of the fate of three innocents shaped and misshaped by their environments and doesn't contain an iota of melodrama, Amelio has given it a less designed look and untheatrical tempos that may try the patience of some viewers. And he's used the faces of his young actors as emotional maps to be read by the camera rather than as instruments of virtuoso acting.

The story is an odyssey from north to south, from Milan to Sicily, from utter despair to a sort of truce with life that teeters on hopelessness without quite falling into it. The film begins, significantly, in Milan, the latest hotbed of Italy's seemingly unstanchable political corruption. A woman is hustled off to prison and her children made wards of the state because the mother has prostituted her eleven-year-old daughter. Two carabinieri are charged with escorting the children to an orphanage in Civitavecchia, but one of them skips off to visit a girlfriend. The other officer, Criaco, scarcely more than a boy himself, but intelligent and honorable, takes the kids to the state home only to learn that its officials don't want a former prostitute on the premises even though she's only eleven years old and no willing collaborator in her own corruption. Since the children are Sicilian, they are reassigned to a Sicilian orphanage and Criaco disgustedly accepts the prolongation of his wretched assignment. At first there is nothing but muted hostility between the children and their guard, but Criaco's impatience is undermined by his humanity. He knows that these children have been robbed of their childhood and he determines to restore a piece of it to them. The remainder of the film shows how the young soldier enacts his good intentions and how the kids respond 10 the treatment.

It is a heartwarming scenario yet the film, though poignant enough, never even attempts to jerk tears. Areclio has set himself a harsher task. As the children are driven, by train and car, to the south. the director presents an Italy that we have never seen or heard before in either Italian films or in Amencan movies about Italy. It is an insanely new, impersonal, noisy country, a place where you are always in public, and the public forms a singularly "lonely crowd." I use the Riesman phrase deliberately because Italy, always portrayed in earlier movies as chaotic but convivial, has, in Amelio's vision, become singularly American in its noisiness. This hubbub isn't that of friends greeting each other in cares or merchants extolling their wares in a public market. It isn't even like that of the revelers and paparazzi in La Dolce Vita. The noise is coming mostly from machines! Car radios, portable cassette players, television sets, P.A. systems, train whistles, car and train engines are all performing at full force. No wonder the passers-by are mute. Who could compete? Why even try? And, amid all that noise, who can attune their ears to the few mumbled words of a couple of kids who have been stunned into near-silence by the unspeakable crimes committed in the locked rooms of their own home? The kids aren't discomfited by the racket. In fact, there are moments in this movie when you feel that the most merciful thing that could happen to the girl, in light of her frightening past, would be to live in a noisy public place forever and never again have to face an adult male in an intimate setting.

But the adult male who has temporary charge of her is determined not to let her sink into such despair. He does, miraculously, find places where he and the kids can face and hear each other. Significantly, these places are either above ground (on the rooftops of inns, the terraces of hotels) or apart from the city (the beach). These confrontations are the core of this film and they are also the scenes that will divide any audience into those who are ready for Stolen Children and those who will find it a bore.

For Amelio's camera attends, waits upon, the children's responses as patiently as Criaco does, and these responses aren't quick in coming. How could they be, given the state of shock the kids are in? And though another director might have been tempted to jolly things along with scenes of easy pathos calculated to make the viewer's eyes mist, this is not Amelio's way. He makes the viewer work hard to see the brief flickers of emotion that the soldier evokes from the children. I have no idea whether the child actors, Valentina Scalici and Giuseppe Ieracitano, are professional players or simply cast to type, but in any event they are used as the neorealists of the forties and fifties used nonprofessionals: the pressure of the situation is applied as directly as possible on the performer with the camera close enough to catch the reaction. Shunned are the craftily placed pause, the significant inflection, the poignant diminuendo at the end of a sentence--all the cunning processing of emotion that both good and bad child actors give you. Scalici and Ieracitano are, by contrast, as maddeningly opaque as the kids you often meet in real life. But that makes it all the more gratifying when the ice is finally broken and their emotions do finally flow.

I don't mean to give the impression that Stolen Children is a crypto-documentary or even a belated bloom of neorealism. Amelio is quite as capable of making a scene work through powerful imagery as by focusing on faces. There is a moment on a beach when the girl watches Criaco teaching her brother to swim that is visualized so powerfully as a mythic moment, with the soldier seen as a sort of man-porpoise on whose back the boy rides, that I won't soon 1orget it. But, on the whole, Amelio holds last to the hard surface of things: concrete buildings and stony faces.

The small and few faults of this movie are mostly the flip sides of its merit. The lassitude that the kids feel in the early part of their journey is well conveyed but sometimes threatens to topple the movie into boredom. (It never does, though.) A more serious flaw is the rather sentimental conception of Criaco's character, all of whose virtues apparently come from his good clean peasant upbringing. Pan of the greatness of Open Doors resided in the complexity of its hero, the magistrate DiFrancesco, whose character encompassed cantankerousness, compassion, tenderness, and cynicism without strain. Enrico Lo Verso is exactly right as Criaco, but at a certain point fairly early in the film| we realize that the young officer isn't going to surprise us, and we need a hero with more layers 10 his nature to be fully held by a story that depends as much on character as Stolen Children does.

There is also an impediment to enjoyment that is not Amelio's fault but is inherent in any naturalistic film in a foreign language. Subtitles call our attention to the dialogue, emphasize it, italicize it. This hurts any movie in which the talk is not as important as the silences within talk or as the failure of talk to occur. We should keep our eyes on the faces where so much drama is being expressed but we can't resist the downward tug of the printed words. I can't wait to see Stolen Children a second time so that I can skip the subtitles altogether.

Yet it is the dialogue in the penultimate scene that crystalizes the tragic theme of the movie. Criaco, having captured a thief while sightseeing with the kids, isn't praised but blamed by a superior for having dallied during his assigmnent. "You did as you liked," the officer charges. In a movie in which all evil occurs because people do as they like or do as they feel they must to get by, in which an entire society seems to be (in Robert Lowdl's phrase) sliding by on grease, Criaco alone has acted according to conscience. And yet he is the one accused of being a sort of kidnapper. (Il Ladro di Bambini, The Thief of Children is the original title of the movie.) But Amelio presents society itself as the real "ladro," the thief of childhood, the bureaucratic grinder of young humanity.