Pure Heart (2024)

Pure Heart

The debut feature of Pure Hearts (Cuori Puri) Italian director Roberto De Paolis tells the story of a 17-year-old girl whose mother is very religious and wants her to abstain from sex until marriage. This tenderly handled romance never feels preachy because it taps into such different tensions as the rise in evangelicalism in contemporary economically deprived Italy or indeed attitudes towards the country’s Roma population who are here represented by some of its more wandering members.

Selene Caramazza and Simone Liberati are both newcomers but make for a very attractive couple as this film keeps itself focused entirely on them. A good run at festivals should follow its Directors’ Fortnight debut, although given its small scale and the familiarity of that central dynamic, it may not get too far beyond home territories.

Twentysomething Stefano (Liberati) works security in a mall when he catches Agnese (Caramazza), a doe eyed girl who has just stolen a phone, after running down the street after her. The messages from boys that Marta Agnese’s mother, played by Barbora Bobulova (Sacred Heart), who dials back on the glamour found on her daughter’s own phone were “filthy”, she said to Stefano.

Having let her go, Stefano gets sacked; he finds himself babysitting a car park next to a camp of gypsies who wind him up something rotten but good. Agnese returns to the camp with toys and old clothes; this puzzles the rough-diamond Stefano, who supports his parents on his meagre wage after they get evicted from their flat.

De Paolis handles their growing relationship deftly, especially when it comes to Liberati as a charismatic lead man able to put some conviction behind an otherwise prejudiced character’s soft side: he wants to do right by those around him but can’t quite see his way clear to giving the gypsies a break. They keep smashing up the parking lot’s fence, and caving in windshields.

De Paolis and co-writers Luca Infascelli, Carlo Salsa and Greta Scicchitano take aim at assumptions about class Agnese won’t think twice about shoplifting but Stefano’s folks are living in a trailer just like those occupied by the Roma he holds in such low regard as well as religion. Characters who would be caricatures elsewhere, like Agnese’s pious mother, don’t get thrown under buses here: Marta apologises after asking a doctor to check her daughter’s chastity, and she is clearly haunted by something from her past that isn’t spelled out but has fed her paranoia.

Nor is Agnese’s religious instructor Don Luca (Stefano Fresi), who quotes the Sermon on the Mount: “Happy are those who have a pure heart, for they will see God,” portrayed in broad strokes. The film sides with those who believe of course that you can be sexually active before marriage and still be ‘pure’, but its refusal to make straw men of those holding different faith-based positions only strengthens its argument.

De Paolis and cinematographer Claudio Cofrancesco (a camera operator on 2015’s Mia Madre, now lensing features) prefer multiple mid-range shots taken by hand. This contrasts Agnese’s church group, which is set in a comfortable pastel world, with the squalid outskirts of Rome where Stefano and his friends especially drug dealer Lele (Edoardo Pesce) hang out.

The camera moves just as freely as Pure Hearts’ two main characters; the film ends all of a sudden after a foot chase that it begins with. In this particular chase, Stefano abandons bigotry forever and the two lovers hold each other tight while proclaiming their relationship to both their worlds, in what can only be described as an unexpected yet somehow logical culmination.

Watch Pure Heart For Free On Gomovies.