Today, it can be difficult for an Italian filmmaker to make a movie about the city of Naples, given that Italian film icon Paolo Sorrentino almost owns the grass. 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 latest, “La Grazia,” opened this year’s Venice Film Festival, The Fest where colleague Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi premiered on his own film set in Naples, “during the clouds” on Saturday.
But Rosi is the type of filmmaker who does not get too much stuck in comparisons. A documentary specialist he usually moves to a place for a long time and lives with the people there for months before ever picking 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 Counties of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Kurdistan for “Notturno” in 2020. Clouds, “It was to hang out and study rather than to craft a fictional story the way a narrative movie maker like Sorrentino would do.
Yet it is safe to say that Rossi’s new film is no less of a beautiful evocation of the city yet, “says Parthenope.” But in this case, the beauty of rich black and white compositions and the city’s life is depicted in the life of a wide range of citizens rather than embodied in a young woman who gave Sorrentino’s exquisite beautiful film her title.
“Under the clouds”, which is not only in Naples but in the surrounding area near Mount Vesuvius, begins with the Jean Cocteau line, “Vesuvius makes all clouds in this world.” It is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but Rosi almost makes you believe it with his eye for extraordinary compositions – although some of the film’s opening images of clouds actually come from an old documentary about the disastrous outbreak of Vesuvius in 79 AD, which obliterated neighboring cities including Pompeii and Herculum.
The volcano has “under the clouds” and gives it a dramatically different feeling than Rosi’s last films. Where “fire by the sea” was set against the urgency in 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 excavated from two centuries ago. “Under the clouds” does not have the instant of “Fire at Sea” and “Notturno”; It is not at the right time that these movies were, but there is something Evanescent and timeless about it.
But this comes over in suggestions and conclusions, or from call to a fire brigade line in the aftermath of an earthquake where several calls immediately asked if the shakes were connected to Vesuvius. (They were not.)
Rosi’s attitude, and this has not changed, is to collect fantastic framed pictures of everyday life and then gather them without story, explanation, talk heads or any attempt to give more context than a viewer can discern step by step.
So “under the clouds” starts with the movie about Vesuvius, which plays in a dramatically snuff old theater, then jumps to a train traveling through the city, then to firefighters that examine a hidden hole in the soil leading to an underground tunnel used by Tomb Raiders …
The fire brigade is the closest of a backbone in the film, with the atmosphere in the city measured with conversations that enter the emergency line and of the efficiency and humor from the operators. A person feels duty -bound to explain that they made “a nice ragu” when the earthquake met and then adds: “I have stomach pain and my head hurts”; Another is puzzled by inquiries about her “coordinates”, finally coughs up her address, just to make the operator smile, turn to his colleagues and mumble, “37! Play it in Lotto!”
The details of what Rosi shows are almost temporary. It is the images he creates, and the fluent that these images are woven together, which creates a mood that acts as their own type of story. We see emergency workers, immigrants, researchers and shop owners, a city at rest and a city in concern.
With Rosi who makes his own cinematography and “The Brutalist” composer Daniel Blumber who delivers music that can live up to the pictures, “Under the clouds” is a tondo that praises a region that suffers from beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be safe, but in a way that is the point.
