There are fierce and overwhelmingly authentic performances here from first-timers in Julien Colonna’s terrific mob drama. The setting is Corsica, around the 1990s, in the coastal region of Ajaccio, famously the home of Napoleon. Lesia (played by nonprofessional Ghjuvanna Benedetti) is a moody 15-year-old girl living with her aunt, hanging out with her friends and boisterous extended family of cousins.
School is out for the summer and Lesia appears to be getting into a romance with a local boy. Maybe because of this, or due to other reasons, she is ordered to leave her aunt’s house and go to the luxurious and fortified family compound of her widowed father. This is mob boss Pierre-Paul (superbly played by Saveriu Santucci), a heavy-set, slow-moving but intimidating patriarch who is perhaps displeased with her behaviour, but also gruffly tender and indulgent.
Lesia soon senses that her dad and his consiglieri are discussing a recent attempted hit on his life, and the need for payback. At first, Lesia had been pining to go back home to her aunt, but soon she is thrilled to be an intimate witness, daughter and lieutenant to her father. Perhaps like Mary Corleone or Meadow Soprano, Lesia has an intense awareness of her own blueblood status and her father’s importance in the world, as well as his importance to her personally. She has, of course, long forgotten about her crush on that callow boy: her father is the real man in her life.
The performances of Benedetti and Santucci in the long and intimate dialogue scenes that Colonna gives them are really outstanding, as Pierre-Paul sadly explains the endless cycle of revenge that is now his life, and which began when he had to avenge his father’s death more than three decades previously: “A young man’s anger … all human history is based on it.” We know what’s coming, of course, but the film shows that something in its very inevitability is shocking. An intensely atmospheric, absorbing and exciting drama.
• The Kingdom is in UK and Irish cinemas from 8 August
