Il Buco – first-look review

It has been 11 long years since the Ital­ian film­mak­er Michelan­ge­lo Fram­marti­no graced us with his won­der­ful, goat-filled doc-fic­tion hybrid, Le Quat­tro Volte. There were, indeed, so many goats on screen that it was often affec­tion­ate­ly referred to as ​“The Goat Movie”, as in, ​“You must see the… etc”. Il Buco (The Hole) is his long await­ed fol­low-up, and those look­ing to con­tin­ue the lit­tle name game that start­ed so many years ago could refer to it as ​“The Spelunk­ing Movie”. Or, if you want­ed to make things even eas­i­er on your­self, you could just go ahead and call it a masterpiece.

There’s a way of watch­ing Il Buco that may take a lit­tle time to attune to, in the same way you might have to while watch­ing a Jacques Tati movie. It’s a ques­tion of image nav­i­ga­tion: Fram­marti­no shoots main­ly in long shots and the man­ner in which you take the sto­ry in is, as above, a bit of a game. You must first work out where your atten­tion is sup­posed to be focused, and then if you do fol­low your instincts, you must then cal­cu­late whether you are miss­ing out on details else­where. There might be a clue, like a dim flick­er of light in the mid­dle dis­tance, or some rum­bling sounds ema­nat­ing from a cer­tain area off-screen. But each shot needs to be unlocked.

On that note: film­mak­ers vocal­ly plead­ing with audi­ences to see movies in the cin­e­ma – or the biggest screen avail­able to them – is cur­rent­ly in vogue despite valid protes­ta­tions regard­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty. One hopes that Fram­marti­no joins the cho­rus, as it gen­uine­ly seems as if he has made a film which only func­tions in its intend­ed way by being expe­ri­enced in the enclosed, sen­so­ry-deprived envi­rons of a pitch black and com­plete­ly silent cin­e­ma. And one with a top spec sound sys­tem for that mat­ter. There is no doubt that see­ing this on a lap­top or a phone would yield a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence – and a less­er one at that.

This dia­logue-free voy­age into the unknown takes its inspi­ra­tion from a spelunk­ing mis­sion in Cal­abria dur­ing the 1960s, as a close-knit crew roll up to a near­by vil­lage and then head out to the wilder­ness where they pitch up next to the Bifur­to abyss – the third deep­est sink­hole cave ever dis­cov­ered. Fram­marti­no cap­tures the rag-tag team’s der­ring do as – with jaw-drop­ping­ly lo-fi means – its mem­bers low­er them­selves deep into the Earth, using flam­ing news mag­a­zines as a way to see how deep the hole plunges. The film is a fond recre­ation of how this cave was discovered.

As this group cast their eyes on land­scapes nev­er before seen, a lone farmer sits on a hill­side tend­ing his herd and is sud­den­ly struck down with ill­ness. Fram­marti­no draws heart­break­ing par­al­lels with the veins of the earth being prized open up by these intre­pid explor­ers, and the veins of the farmer which are being blocked and cal­ci­fied by the rav­ages of time and age.

It’s a mag­nif­i­cent piece of work, com­plete­ly beguil­ing from end to end and one which wears its immense philo­soph­i­cal pro­fun­di­ty with admirable light­ness. In the spir­it of its sub­ject, the direc­tor offers us images of the like sel­dom seen in cin­e­ma, with each slow reveal of a cre­pus­cu­lar under­ground antecham­ber or a sta­lac­tite-filled wall gift­ing us a feast for the sens­es and soft-spo­ken hymn to human endeav­our and the tran­scen­dent, mys­te­ri­ous beau­ty of the nat­ur­al world.

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