Sacro GRA

The big star of Gian­fran­co Rosi’s pleas­ant, ambling docu­soap is the Grande Rac­cor­do Anu­lare, a 62km ring-road which omi­nous­ly orbits the city of Rome. Much like the British cin­e­mat­ic stal­warts of the psy­cho­georg­ra­phy move­ment, those behind films such as the exem­plary, wit­ty Robin­son in Space (Patrick Keiller), Swandown (Andrew Köt­ting) and sleep furi­ous­ly (Gideon Kop­pel), Rosi trains his cam­era on the lon­ers and odd­balls who have a vague sense of social uni­for­mi­ty imposed upon them via the sprawl of this mighty 6‑lane motorway.

The film allows us a glimpse into the lives of an eel fish­er­man, an itin­er­ant palm tree sur­geon, a bick­er­ing father and daugh­ter, a fad­ed aris­to­crat, a pair of doled-up tran­sients and, most mov­ing­ly, a lone­ly para­medic whose tragedy-strewn beat is the haz­ardous GRA. Though charm­ing and light­ly poet­ic on a moment-by-moment basis, the film point­ed­ly vetoes any kind of easy the­mat­ic cohe­sion. There’s nev­er a point at which these ​‘char­ac­ters’ come across as any­thing more than ran­dom par­tic­i­pants in Rosi’s art­ful por­trait of con­tem­po­rary urban detritus.

One theme that does poke its way through is a fear of out­siders, as exem­pli­fied by the elder­ly eel fish­er who is clear­ly an old guard nation­al­ist. His mild big­otry is played pure­ly for laughs as he barks at a news­pa­per report on the migra­tion pat­terns of the glob­al eel pop­u­la­tion, his long-suf­fer­ing wife sat beside him fix­ing a net and bare­ly acknowl­edg­ing a word he says. More sym­bol­i­cal­ly, the palm tree sur­geon uses a sub-son­ic micro­phone to lis­ten for the shrieks of Red Palm Wee­vils who devour the plant from the inside. He takes a dev­il­ish glee in assid­u­ous­ly locat­ing and destroy­ing these pesky ​“invaders”.

Else­where, there appears to be very lit­tle draw­ing togeth­er this scat­ter­ing of poignant vignettes. There are hints of the grotesque in the sub­jects Rosi selects, that we’re sup­posed to look beyond their pover­ty or mar­gin­al­i­ty and at the absurd, tragi­com­ic humour inher­ent in their behav­iour, their appear­ance and their exis­tence. One might even see it as verg­ing on the patro­n­is­ing, a con­duit through which mid­dle-class view­ers can tit­ter at the hard­scrab­ble lot of the work­ing classes.

Rosi invites view­ers to laugh at these peo­ple, a tac­tic which helps evade the fact that, as a whole, this hand­some­ly pho­tographed film amounts to very lit­tle indeed. It’s pas­si­ble, incon­se­quen­tial and amus­ing enter­tain­ment, lack­ing any kind of intel­lec­tu­al con­vic­tion and instead offer­ing mild, insight-neur­al tall tales of quo­tid­i­an strug­gles and dip­py sub­ur­ban­ites in its place.