MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Fate’: Portrait of a Family Caught in Cycle of Poverty

In 1961, filmmakers Robert M. Young and Michael Roemer made for NBC “Cortile Cascino,” a documentary about a woman and her family living in a slum in the heart of Palermo, Italy. The network deemed it too strong to air, but Young managed to get his hands on much of what he and Roemer had shot. Three decades later this footage has been incorporated in their powerful “Children of Fate” (at the Nuart) by Young’s son Andrew and Andrew’s wife, Susan Todd, who discovered the woman, Angela, and her relatives still living in or near Palermo.

At 53, the sturdy, resilient Angela is still enduring hardship and tragedy, just as she was three decades earlier, but she has improved her own lot considerably. A woman of much native intelligence but little or no education, she finally found the courage to leave her drunken, abusive husband after 28 years, move to a charming town nearby where she has a nice apartment and supports herself as a cleaning woman (and is amusingly candid about cheating her employers in minor ways).

On the whole, “Children of Fate” is a portrait of an extended family caught up in a vicious cycle of poverty, ignorance and crime, a kind of companion piece to Werner Schroeter’s elegiac drama, “The Kingdom of Naples.”

Never mind that most of the slum, Cortile Cascino, has been torn down and that Angela and her relatives now live in considerably more material comfort. One of Angela’s sons has spent half his life in prison and at 31 feels like an old man; the daughters she strived so mightily to ensure a better life have met even sadder fates than their brother. Angela’s husband, Luigi, once a slicked-up petty crook, is now a blubbery, bleary-eyed wreck residing in Cortile Cascino’s last remaining building, eking out a living scavenging scrap metal.

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Yet even as the film strikes the pessimistic, deterministic note its title suggests, there are little flashes of hope. Angela’s younger son, handsome as a movie star, has been saved by a loving wife who works with him cleaning offices; they dream of the day when they can open a grocery store. This son has discovered that being a man means being responsible--and not in being a wife-beater. Maybe even someone born in Cortile Cascino can have some effect over his own destiny after all.

Robert Young and Michael Roemer’s black-and-white footage has the lyricism and impact of Italian Neo-Realism as we watch Angela’s family and neighbors go about their daily lives in a picturesque rabbit warren of ancient, crumbling structures, picking rags and staving off hunger as best they can while bearing ever more children they cannot possibly afford to feed, let alone educate. Water for the entire community comes from a single pipe; basic modern conveniences are unheard-of luxuries.

Cortile Cascino society is Mafia-permeated and profoundly macho, and, for all the prostitution going on, puritanical: A single kiss upon her cheek from Luigi dictated that Angela marry him regardless of her feelings about him.

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Andrew Young and Susan Todd really do not match the quality or style of the earlier footage. Their straightforward work, in color, is more informal, talkier. They film largely in a series of nondescript apartments in place of the highly photogenic, richly atmospheric Cortile Cascino. Even so, their deft crosscutting between past and present is most effective, defining sharply all that has changed in 30 years--and all that has not.

Arguably, the most intriguing figure in “Children of Fate” (Times-rated Mature) is not the forthright, realistic Angela but her brother Gildo. Thirty years earlier he seemed for the world a punk just like Luigi, but today is an antiques dealer--Angela says murkily she wouldn’t hazard a guess as to where he gets the stuff--who lives in a tastefully furnished apartment. Gildo is also a philosopher, acknowledging that getting ahead in life can lead to self-absorption and admitting to occasional longings for the camaraderie of the old neighborhood, bad as it was. Material success has its pitfalls, he reflects: “The more you have, the more you want.”

‘Children of Fate’

A First Run Features release of a Young/Friedson production in association with Archipelago Films. Directors-editors Andrew Young and Susan Todd. Producer Adam Friedson. Executive producer-director Robert M. Young. Cinematographer Andrew Young. Music Ted Kuhn, John La Barbera. Sound Susan Todd. “Cortile Cascino,” 1961: Writers-directors-editors Robert Young, Michael Roemer. Producer NBC. Camera Robert Young. Sound Michael Roemer. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for adult themes).