Review: Il Buco’s Deep Dive into the Past Is Immersive but Also Oblique

The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.

Il Buco
Photo: Grasshopper Film

Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco is a docu-fiction hybrid that lovingly and patiently recreates a speleological expedition deep inside a remote sinkhole. But while the film is at once meticulous in its evocation of mid-century Italian spelunking, its search for broader thematic resonance is frustratingly general.

From the surface, the titular hole appears as a scar on the picturesque Calabrian countryside—the same setting that Frammartino explored with hushed jubilance in 2010’s Le Quattro Volte—but as we’ll see through the filmmaker’s detailed observation of the spelunkers’ work, it extends deep into the Earth. Lit only by the cavers’ helmet lamps, the sinkhole is a place of quiet mystery, whose depths are a promise of shadowy beauty and danger.

Just about any other take on this material would have played up the perilousness nature of the spelunking. By contrast, Il Buco focuses on the way that the expeditioners carry out their work without comment, drama, or any obvious emotion. Frammartino and cinematographer Renato Berta present the men, consummate professionals who operate with a clear sense of purpose, as figural subjects across a series of exquisite pictorial compositions. Fascinated by the interplay of light and landscape, the filmmakers memorably contrast the sunlit verdancy of the open field where the men work with the deep, dark interior of the sinkhole.

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Il Buco readily immerses viewers in its world with shots of clouds casting shadows over rolling hills, spelunkers gradually finding their way through total darkness, and campfires illuminating the men’s craggy faces. But whereas Le Quattro Volte, with its four-part structure derived from Pythagoras’s theory of metempsychosis, provided a kind of built-in rubric for interpreting and appreciating its imagery, Il Buco feels comparatively formless.

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The film’s main through line is, of course, the exploration of the hole, scenes of which have a certain quiet momentum. There’s a steady pull to scenes of the expedition crew dropping flaming bits of paper down the crevasse to gauge its depth or coolly passing a raft back and forth across a pool of water until the entire crew has passed from one side to the other.

Frammartino juxtaposes these scenes of speleological exploration with shots of a wordless hermit who watches the crew from his elevated hillside perch. The man serves as a kind of surrogate audience member, but his presence also feels slightly contrived, particularly when he grows ill and is taken to a farmhouse where he slowly passes away. His death provides a metaphysical counterpoint to the end of the cavers’ expedition, which reaches its conclusion with the discovery of the hole’s walled-off bottom. All things must eventually come to an end, the film suggests—an accurate observation, to be sure, but far from profound.

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Frammartino’s film is grounded in a particular time and place—Italy, 1961—through the inclusion of certain details such as archival footage of the construction of Milan’s Pirelli Tower and a magazine with JFK and Richard Nixon on the cover. In one scene, the residents of a small town tucked away in the Calabrian hills gather outside a local bar to watch a television broadcast of a jazzy dance number. These particularities remind us that there’s a big, bustling world outside the idyllic environs of Calabria, but the purpose of doing so remains vague.

Perhaps Frammartino is suggesting that the calm, rustic way of life depicted in the film will eventually come to an end with the encroachment of modern technology and the disruptions of globalization. If so, this renders the film’s rigorous recreation of early-’60s Calabria into little more than an immaculately mounted nostalgia trip. For all its striking images, Il Buco is ultimately, like the sinkhole that its subjects explore, a dead end.

Score: 
 Cast: Paolo Cossi, Jacopo Elia, Denise Trombin, Claudia Candusso, Mila Costi, Carlos Jose Crespo, Federico Gregoretti, Antonio Lanza, Nicola Lanza, Leonardo Larocca  Director: Michelangelo Frammartino  Screenwriter: Michelangelo Frammartino, Giovanna Giuliani  Distributor: Grasshopper Film  Running Time: 93 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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