‘Below The Clouds’ review: Evocative black-and-white study of Naples from documentarian Gianfranco Rosi

Dir: Gianfranco Rosi. Italy. 2025. 115mins

To the outsider, Naples is commonly seen as a metropolis of color and life, a spot of effervescent exuberance. Not so in Giancarlo Rosi’s strikingly melancholic documentary portrait of the southern Italian metropolis. Right here one other Naples emerges: a metropolis the place the residing and lifeless coexist and comingle, the place floor certainties are undermined by underground forces each prison and seismic, the place the previous derails the current. A metropolis shot in stark, high-contrast black and white, as if bled dry.

Refreshingly untouristy view of web sites acquainted to international guests

The movie sees documentarian Rosi return to Venice competitors, the place he gained the Golden Lion for Sacro GRA in 2013. He additionally gained Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2016 for Fireplace At Sea. The Lampedusa migrant emergency that underpinned that movie gave it an urgency and forex that’s largely missing in Beneath the Clouds, however the story Rosi weaves right here about Naples as an city limbo area remains to be deeply evocative, and never with out moments of wry humour.  

Actually it’s a return to kind after the director’s final characteristic, the papal travelogue In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis, which felt like an in-between undertaking, and performed out of competitors at Venice’s 2022 version. 01 Distribution will launch Beneath The Clouds (‘Sotto le nuvole’ is its Italian title), in Italy on September 18, following a berth in Toronto, however it appears prone to drift into arthouse berths in different territories too, helped alongside by its refreshingly untouristy view of web sites acquainted to international guests – amongst them Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Naples’ Archaeological Museum. 

The movie opens with a quote from poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau: “Vesuvius makes all of the clouds on the planet”. Right here they’re within the opening frames, fended by eruptive vomits of lava. We pull again to see the volcano within the distance, considered at nightfall from a seashore abandoned aside from horses racing knee-deep by way of the surf dragging buggies behind them. The drivers are shadows, similar to the passengers on the Circumvesuviana commuter prepare that acts right here as a sort of visible chorus.

In Pompeii, two younger boys stare in fascination at one of many plaster casts of the traditional Roman city’s burnt and asphyxiated victims. As filmed by Rosi, these casts hauntingly counsel presence by way of absence – similar to the tunnels dug by Neapolitan archaeological robbers, which lead into buried Roman villas whose historic murals have been chiselled off the partitions. The fireplace brigade are referred to as in to discover these tunnels, and in addition want a heavy police escort to place out fires set by bands of masked youths. Emergency companies telephone operators now double as social employees and psychologists, reassuring terrified callers that there was no earthquake, no eruption.

Photos start to chime and hyperlink arms. A sheet of pumice calving down a volcanic slope recollects one other of the movie’s recurrent places – an enormous ship, moored in a Neapolitan port and crewed by Syrians, who wade up slopes of grain within the vessel’s big maintain, bearing long-handled brooms which they use to comb snowfalls of wheat from the tucks and folds of the irregular partitions. Sisyphus lives on, on this metropolis based by Historical Greek colonists. The truth that as quickly as they end, these affected person, resigned, dignified males will head again to war-torn Odessa for an additional load, offers the knife an additional twist.

As all the time, Rosi’s type is rigorously observational: within the nice underground storerooms of Naples’ archaeological museum, we’re even grateful for a curator’s behavior of speaking to herself as she illuminates, with a flashlight, big heaps and forests of statuary. A soundtrack by Daniel Blumberg, the Oscar- and BAFTA-winning composer of The Brutalist, is as sparse and ominous as the town of ghosts that Rosi’s masterful, oneiric documentary paints in shades of darkness and lightweight.