These days, it can be tricky for an Italian filmmaker to make a movie about the city of Naples, considering that Italian filmmaking icon Paolo Sorrentino almost owns that turf. Sorrentino has focused on the city throughout his career, including two of his last three films, 2021’s Oscar-nominated “The Hand of God” and last year’s “Parthenope.” Sorrentino’s most recent, “La Grazia,” opened this year’s Venice Film Festival, the fest where fellow Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi premiered his own film set in Naples, “Below the Clouds,” on Saturday.
But Rosi is the kind of filmmaker who doesn’t get caught up too much in comparisons. A documentary specialist, he typically moves to a location for an extended period of time and lives with the people there for months before he ever picks up a camera. He did that on the island of Lampedusa for his masterful 2016 doc “Fire at Sea,” which received an Oscar documentary nomination, and did it again in the war-torn countries of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Kurdistan for “Notturno” in 2020. So when he brought his cameras to Naples for “Below the Clouds,” it was to hang out and study rather than to craft a fictional story the way a narrative filmmaker like Sorrentino would do.
Still, it’s safe to say that Rossi’s new film is no less of a beautiful evocation of the city than, say, “Parthenope.” But in this case, the beauty comes in rich black-and-white compositions and the life of the city is depicted in the lives of a wide range of citizen rather than embodied in one young woman who gave Sorrentino’s exquisitely beautiful film its title.
“Below the Clouds,” which is set not just in Naples but in the surrounding area near Mount Vesuvius, begins with the Jean Cocteau line, “Vesuvius makes all the clouds of this world.” That’s no doubt an exaggeration, but Rosi almost makes you believe it with his eye for extraordinary compositions — although some of the film’s opening shots of clouds actually come from an old documentary about the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, which wiped out neighboring towns including Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The volcano haunts “Below the Clouds,” and gives it a dramatically different feel than Rosi’s last films. Where “Fire at Sea” was set against the urgency of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and “Notturno” took place in the shadow of destructive wars, his new film sits in a region where dead bodies are still being excavated from two centuries ago. “Below the Clouds” doesn’t have the immediacy of “Fire at Sea” and “Notturno”; it’s not timely the way those films were, but there’s something evanescent and timeless about it.
But this comes across in suggestion and inference, or from the calls to a fire department emergency line in the aftermath of an earthquake in which several callers immediately asked if the tremors were connected to Vesuvius. (They weren’t.)
Rosi’s approach, and this hasn’t changed, is to collect gorgeously-framed images of everyday life and then assemble them without narration, explanation, talking heads or any attempt to supply more context than what a viewer can discern incrementally.
So “Below the Clouds” begins with the movie about Vesuvius playing in a dramatically dingy old theater, then jumps to a train traveling through town, then to firemen who investigate a hidden hole in the earth that leads to an underground tunnel that is being used by tomb raiders …
The fire department is the closest thing of a backbone in the film, with the mood of the city measured by calls that come in on the emergency line and by efficiency and humor of the operators. One person feels duty-bound to explain that they were making “a nice ragu” when the earthquake hit, and then adds, “I have stomach pains and my head hurts”; another is baffled by requests for her “coordinates,” then finally coughs up her address, only to have the operator smile, turn to his colleagues and mutter, “37! Play it in the Lotto!”
The details of what Rosi shows are almost incidental. It’s the imagery he creates, and the fluidity with which those images are woven together, that create a mood that functions as its own kind of narrative. We see emergency workers, immigrants, researchers and shop owners, a city at rest and a city in turmoil.
With Rosi doing his own cinematography and “The Brutalist” composer Daniel Blumberg supplying music that can live up to the images, “Below the Clouds” is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be sure, but in a way that’s the point.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.
