Corpo Celeste

A low-key Italian film about religious awakening in the geographical center of Roman Catholicism, Corpo Celeste stars Yle Vianello as Italian-born 13-year-old Marta, who returns to her native country with her mother, Rita (Anita Caprioli), after living abroad for 10 years. Rita takes a job as a hard-toiling worker in a monotonous, pressure-cooker manual-labor job in a sweatshop-style bakery, but insular and introspective Marta slowly begins to show signs of resistance when it comes to being re-indoctrinated into Italy's indigenous religious culture, unlike most of her blandly obedient adolescent peers. Although director Alice Rohrwacher gets an adult-caliber performance out of Vianello, the film suffers somewhat from the heavy-handed symbolism used to articulate the dilemmas these youngsters face when confronted with the inevitable dogmatic pull of the Catholic Church. What is clear here, however, is that the Church remains an elitist, ruthlessly authoritarian body with tremendous influence, and Corpo Celeste makes a quiet hero of Marta for subtly resisting its outdated message. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)