The idyllic opening shots of Alberto Sciamma's "Cielo" give no hint of the darkness that follows just a few seconds later. Shots of a tranquil alpine lake with crystal-clear water and a charming girl (Fernanda Gutiérrez Aranda) playing on the shore seem designed to set the stage for something straight out of a fairy tale. And in a way, it is... but this fairy tale begins with the girl swallowing a live goldfish and then bludgeoning her father to death with a large rock.
This scene isn't overdone in terms of shock value or tragedy. The same can be said of the subsequent scene, where young Santa stabs her mother to death. Both moments feel like inevitable events that must be experienced before we can get to the fun part. This is an important distinction to grasp if you want to understand anything else about Sciamma's beautiful magical realist work.
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In "Cielo," life and death exist on an infinite spectrum, and the transitions between them serve more as a logistical matter than as something truly existential. Santa kills his mother (who had fully approved of the plan beforehand) to lift her out of rural Bolivia and escort her to heaven. The eight-year-old girl clearly understands that death is the first step, but we get a feature-length film precisely because she's less clear about the other details.
Fortunately, she encounters many friendly faces willing to help her along the way. On her uncertain journey, Santa drags (at least temporarily) her mother's body through deserts, salt marshes, lakes, churches, and small-town wrestling matches in search of the transcendent afterlife she knows awaits her somewhere. She leaves a trail of miracles and happy accidents in her wake, often receiving help from kind strangers who eventually realize that it's her was sent to their aid. It's a low-stakes story—perhaps the lowest stakes we've ever seen in a film so clearly concerned with matters of life and death—but Aranda's buoyant charisma and cinematographer Alex Metcalf's stunning, dreamlike images make "Cielo" a joy to watch.
Despite all its metaphysical complexity, the film's core rests on an elegantly simple idea: in the mind of an eight-year-old, anything is possible, and we adults don't do ourselves any favors by complicating our worldviews as we age. There's a comical joy in Santa explaining her straightforward beliefs to adults who should know better but ultimately agree with her point of view. You could call it magical realism, or the pure magic that happens when a disillusioned adult heals themselves by talking to a child who still has plenty of time for idealism. But whatever you call it, it's what convinces an otherwise rational priest to hand over the car keys, and wrestlers and police officers to embrace ideas that aren't much more rational.
The film gradually shifts this premise from the literal to the metaphorical, allowing it to expand from a dry meditation on the boundless possibilities of childhood into a more surreal vision that suggests the children were indeed right all along. Sciamma takes the viewer by the hand, leading us to the edge of paradise, while respectfully acknowledging that he must allow each viewer to take the final step on their own terms.
Spiritual maturity occurs somewhere between the moment when you begin to suspect that simple concepts like Heaven and Hell hardly exist in the way religions present them, and the moment when you stop condemning these stories as lies and begin to embrace them as tools designed to explain something truly transcendent to our mortal minds. Cielo is a delightful film that finds its place firmly at the center of this process. Whether Heaven is a literal reward we receive after death or a more abstract state we can experience in this life, it doesn't matter—children like Santa Claus believe in it wholeheartedly, and Sciamma believes that a little faith in them can heal more wounds than any number of church services.
Rating: B+
Cielo, a Juno Films release, is currently playing at Quad Cinemas in New York City.
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