Vesuvius — the very name sounds ancient, rhythmically mythical, so tied into tales of a destroyed past that one almost forgets it’s still very much in the ordinary, existing present. The legendary cone doesn’t exactly loom large in Gianfranco Rosi‘s “Below the Clouds,” a wandering, granular documentary study of its surrounding landscape and population. Instead, it’s auspiciously backgrounded, a calm but threatening variable factored into modern Neapolitan life, nearly two thousand years after it vanquished Pompeii. For some, that drastic legacy amounts to a busy, investigative livelihood, for others it feeds into everyday environmental anxieties, while for others still, it truly is ancient history. There are many ways to live around an active volcano, and this humming, keen-eyed film is interested in all of them.
Though it touches on contemporary geopolitics — with conflicts in Syria and Ukraine threaded into its fraying urban tapestry — “Below the Clouds” seems less bedded in current events than Rosi features like “Notturno” and the Oscar-nominated “Fire at Sea.” As in those films, however, his observations of individually unremarkable days and lives do build to something larger and more societally searching. While among his warmest works, rich in pleasures of place and weather and human motion, it’s no empty travelogue, notwithstanding the sometimes glistening beauty of Rosi’s black-and-white cinematography. After its premiere in competition at Venice, “Below the Clouds” should have little trouble following the director’s other recent docs into general arthouse distribution.
The title stems from a famed Jean Cocteau quote that also opens the film: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” As shot by Rosi, it feels close to true. Silvery blankets of stratus hover over the streets, beaches and surrounding scrub of Naples — a city that gets a more lyrical shake here than in countless grisly-gritty Camorra dramas — while closer to Mount Vesuvius itself, fumaroles release paler breaths of volcanic gas and steam into the mix. There’s manmade smoke, too, of the type that provides steady work for Naples’ weary, put-upon fire department: the most prominently featured of a few municipal bodies surveyed by Rosi here, in a way that lends “Below the Clouds” something of Frederick Wiseman’s inside-out interest in how cities tick.
Of course, there’s much more than fire for them to fight. With his camera planted watchfully in the department’s all-night call center, Rosi observes how a patient, grizzled chief handles crises ranging from a kitten stuck beneath a sidewalk grate to a harrowing real-time incident of violent domestic abuse, as well as one elderly repeat caller who simply wants to know the time, many times a day. They’re the point of contact for perceived natural disasters, too — no Vesuvian calamities, though they’re inundated with terrified calls when the region is hit with a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, the biggest in the Neapolitan area in 40 years.
Out in the field, firemen are on hand to investigate uncovered tunnels and archaeological digs violated by tomb robbers, a task that segues to other authorities under the film’s gaze: the police pursuing these tombaroli, a less lovable quarry here than in Alice Rohrwacher’s delightful “La Chimera,” and the local museums entrusted with housing and protecting fragments of history more legally pulled from the storied soil of the area. In the basement of one such institution, veteran curator Mary pores over a cavernous archive of long-buried, as-yet-unexhibited statues, artefacts and architectural remains that survived the destruction of Pompeii in 79 A.D. “These have been my friends for the last 30 years,” she sighs happily, casting her flashlight over the ruins, setting their craggy details in stark relief. If you can’t live in the past, you can at least live amid it.
Elsewhere in town, a dedicated teacher runs extra-curricular classes for children of various ages in the local library, helping them with their multiplication tables or feeding nascent literary discussion. A dustily upholstered cinema screens Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy,” among other locally apposite titles, to an empty house. And in the port of Torre Annunziata, a Syrian refugee is among the laborers in the towering industrial silos that are steadily filled with Ukrainian grain: The Gulf of Naples is also a limbo area for those waiting to rebuild their lives.
Rosi’s high-contrast monochrome images seek vibrant life and beauty in a region crisscrossed with centuries of scars, though bar some breathtaking individual shots — including one of horsedrawn carts trudging across an overcast beach gleaming with morning rainfall — he isn’t overly interested in postcard tableaux. A starkly experimental score by recent Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg (“The Brutalist”) likewise doesn’t prettify matters, mixing sparse musical instrumentation with more scientific sound-gathering devices — geophones, hydrophones — to extract the groans and reverberations of land and sea. Vesuvius may be biding its time, but it gets a voice of sorts in Rosi’s intricate exploration.
