‘Me Captain’ Review: Matteo Garrone’s Migrant Epic Feels Like a Complete Odyssey Even Before Reaching the Shore
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Though it’s become a convenient catch-all term for journalists covering the subject, the phrase “European migrant crisis” can’t help but leave a sour taste in the mouth — implying as it does that Europe, the destination for so many hard-up voyagers from variously ailing or hostile countries, is the disadvantaged party in all this.
That bias carries through to the bulk of well-intended films on the matter, which tend to pick up migrants’ stories, however sympathetically, on European turf.
Breaking from such Italian titles as Jonas Carpignano’s “Mediterranea,” Emmanuele Crialese’s “Terraferma” and Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea,” Matteo Garrone’s stirring “Me Captain” instead takes Europe not as its setting but as a near-mythic objective, tracing one Senegalese teen’s vast journey from Dakar to Tripoli to overloaded migrant boat in gripping, sometimes agonizing detail.
For Garrone, this proves an energizing shift in focus, yielding his most robust, purely satisfying filmmaking since his international breakthrough with “Gomorrah” 15 years ago.
Read more on variety.com