Having slept solidly through Il Buco, Michelangelo Frammartino’s long-awaited follow-up to the glorious Le Quattro Volte, on my first viewing attempt, I knew already that the film was at the more serene and lyrical end of the arthouse spectrum. What I hadn’t expected, having rewatched with fresher eyes, was quite how compelling this near dialogue-free meditation on overlapping cycles of life would turn out to be.
Loosely inspired by a 1961 caving expedition to Calabria by a group of young speleologists, it’s an arrestingly beautiful work. It finds a pure visual poetry in the way the mossy light of the mountain dusk is echoed by the velvety sage tones of the lichen-covered cave mouth; the way the ancient geological etching on the face of a cow herder evokes the weathered land that he walks each day.
Frammartino’s is a singular directing voice that exists at the indistinct edge where documentary feathers into fiction. The film is a dramatisation, but the approach is the arms-length observational viewpoint more frequently used in a fly-on-the-wall documentary. The wordless earth magic of the storytelling won’t be for everyone, but the film casts a beguiling spell.
