Following Sacro GRA (which earned him the Golden Lion at Venice) and Fire at Sea (chronicling the migration crisis in Lampedusa), Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds arrives as the final instalment of a trilogy exploring contemporary Italian life.
Filmed in crystalline black and white, this mesmerising documentary consists of a series of tableaux captured from fixed camera positions, with no narration, named cast or editorialising.
It falls to the urgent, sparse soundtrack by Daniel Blumberg, the Oscar-winning composer of The Brutalist, to sound the alarm lurking beneath the unhurried Fred Wiseman-worthy rhythms.
[ Sacro Gra review: a gentle drive around the city of RomeOpens in new window ]
The title quotes Jean Cocteau: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” That active volcano, although quiet since erupting in 1944, looms over the densely populated Neapolitan sprawl in billowing clouds.
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This mighty antagonist variously appears in Rosi’s film, sometimes as a reference to the ancient destruction of Pompeii in AD 79 or through the many nightly calls to emergency services.
One correspondent complains that the ongoing seismic activity has interrupted her cooking “a nice ragu”. The same emergency operators field calls concerning domestic violence, arson, wildfires and complaints about horse-drawn carriages.
Above ground we meet Titti, a retired teacher who helps local children with their homework every day. DNA testing reveals that a group of four people whose bodies were, famously, preserved were unrelated and not, as previously assumed, members of a family shielding one another.
But Below the Clouds often mines the subterranean or the cavernous, burrowing its way into cargoes of Ukrainian grain delivered by Syrian immigrants, patiently retired statues under a museum, and along the subterranean network of illicit tunnels where tomb robbers have stripped frescoes from walls.
“Time destroys everything, preserves everything, and then returns to us in an unexpected way,” one archaeologist says.
Taking its cues from those ancient remains, Rosi’s deserving Special Prize winner at Venice gifts us a pristine, durable snapshot of Naples.
On Mubi from Friday, March 27th
