Opiniões dos críticos

Frammartino’s critique is not, however, aimed at the expedition; he is an amateur speleologist himself, and one need only look at the shots taken from within the cave to detect the immense love the director has for the activity. What he is critical of—in a way that echoes Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini, two countrymen who made some of their best work around the time Il Buco takes place—is how dissenting ideas and actions are nefariously co-opted to reinforce capitalism and its narrative of unending progress.

“Il Buco” is riveting and bewitching, a wholly immersive film, led soulfully by Frammartino’s confidence in saying less. The movie is mostly without subtitles (although the speleologists chat and murmur to each other) and also without score. The images speak for themselves. It’s not so much about what’s being said but rather what’s being done.

Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.

In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.

Il buco is, first and foremost, structured around many dualities: fiction and documentary, figure and landscape, man and nature, mysterious and mundane, old and new, terranean surface and subterranean earth, folklore and post-industrial, the rural, traditional lifestyle of Italy’s poor southern villages and the booming economies of its prosperous northern cities, and even more significantly the interplay between different shades of light and dark which accord the film a hypnotic and mystical effect.

Don’t come looking for some simplistic ‘tech = bad’ vs ‘green = good’ smackdown, but while the viewing experience is transportive and absorbing, it still feels like there’s something missing. Like some galvanising idea to electrify the whole thing, or a moment of euphoria to match Le Quattro Volte's memorable cycle-of-life conclusion. Il Buco is certainly thoughtful and worthwhile, but perhaps just short of the revelation we were hoping for.

“Il Buco” is even better than “Le Quattro Volte,” though destined to be less popular. It’s based on a true story about a spelunking trip to a remote Italian village, but mostly it’s a series of picturesque observations of the invasion of society into a place content to reject it.

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.

This film, which feels more like an extended art installation than a full-blown cinematic narrative, might not completely satisfy viewers who have been eagerly awaiting the filmmaker’s latest project. Still, it stands powerfully on its own, offering breathtaking images of rural Italy and a subtle interrogation of the slow creep of change and modernity.

Frammartino is very, very good at waiting. This is not necessarily a peaceful world — there is death, there is destruction, there is bitter weather — but he is at peace with it in all its different tempers. For those who can also be at peace watching a film with no dialogue and no story to speak of, it is a thing of wonder.

Whether or not anyone quite ‘gets’ the Calabrian director’s new film, how often do we see truly original moving images on screen? In its exploration of one of the world’s deep places, illuminated solely by the torches of its actor-speleoplogists, Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.

Frammartino goes about his business in the manner of a discreet anthropologist: rarely interfering, content to simply set up his camera and watch the people and livestock go by, as though the very act of observing is itself a great privilege.