#il buco

[pvrepwnage]

[arcadeunknown]

Il Buco (2021)

dir. Michelangelo Frammartino

[loneberry]

From Il Buco, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. Slow cinema meets spelunking porn in this lovely, understated film. It’s a wordless meditation on the mysteries of the underworld in the spirit of Robert Macfarlane, where you are fully immersed in the acoustics of the cave, the play of light and shadow, the beauty of the Calabrian plateau, and the almost religious mission of the speleologists from the North, as contrasted with the old man who is a kind of guardian of The Hole. All conveyed without dialogue, for the landscape has its own language.

[thecommaconstellation]

[waste-it-on-something-useful]

The Lamentation of Christ, painted by Andrea Mantegna around 1480, is referenced in more films (Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, Radu Jude’s Scarred Hearts), but I like how La gueule ouverte (Maurice Pialat, 1974) and Il buco (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021), have similar titles, which in English translate, respectively, to ‘The Mouth Agape’ and ‘The Hole’.

[jamesmrdouglas]

[giorgiastastes]

El hoyo (2019)

"The message needs no carrier" (spoiler: it actually does)

"There are 3 kinds of people; the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall. "

I've just watched this small masterpieces and here's my own interpretation.

Obviously the whole movie is a big metaphor. Both an analogy about our society and one about the Afterlife are present.

First of all, in my view, the place they're kept into is like a Purgatory between heaven and hell. The protagonist entered there voluntary because after the six months trial he would have expiated his sins and would finally be ready to enter Heaven. The old man is an accidental killer, therefore he doesn't deserve Hell, but definitely can't go into Heaven either, and his punishment is longer than Goreng's because he did in fact end a life.

Also Goreng is referenced multiples times as the Messiah, and his travel towards this purge tower is quite similar to Dante's one.

Each prisoner wakes up the first day of the month in a different position, which represents our birth. Some are born in better environments, families and countries and all of it is just luck, fate.

Then, since everyone knows that each of higher floors will likely take advantage of their position, our selfishness takes the best of us.

The higher floors know that the lower ones will literally eat their leftovers, while the ones under know that they better take as much as they can, otherwise they won't be able to survive. There's no altruism or generosity in the society.

You're placed high, you sh*t on who's below. You're below, you dream to reach above.

Each of the characters represents something.

The first roommate, the old man, is someone who's very aware of their surrounding, who's tired of fighting and knows very well how the world works because he's been in a better as much as a worse situation.

The lady coming from the Administration is a middle class representative, trying to change the world but also completely unaware of what's happening right under her nose.

The fact that she keeps on saying that a baby cannot be there and there are 200 floors is just further proof that we blindly lie to ourselves that things can't be that bad, that the world isn't that evil and the rules are respect, being delusional of course, to help us sleep at night. That's why when she hits lower than what she was told was possible, she killed herself.

She's also a vegetarian, with a big love for animals. She obviously represents both an activist that is trying to tell others that they shouldn't eat more than they need, because that means that who's lower won't have anything left, which is such a big innuendo to climate change, but at the same time she's also a privileged person who's never been lower than a certain point and thinks that anyone can easily "just eat less" without caring about other's issues (it reminded me of some vegans who cannot accept that veganism is not accessible or sustainable for the majority of the would population)

The last roommate, the one with the rope represents a religious person, who endures the hardship without giving up because of his faith.

Another pragmatic sequence in my opinion was the one where the two, while descending the tower, met an ill man with a companion with the Down Syndrome (I'm sorry if I'm sounding insensitive is just that I don't know how else to better describe the scene to make it recognizable to you) who said that he will proceed to suffocate his cellmate to also eat what went into his stomach even while being no more hungry himself, I mean, can you better descrive greed than this sentence?

Now, coming to the final scene, which left many of the viewers disappoint or confused, here's my idea.

The deranged girl who claims to have a daughter is definitely crazy, but not completely gone. I do believe there is a baby there, and the Administration is probability unaware of that because there's someone higher than them, and they're being lied to, also. But I don't think the protagonist actually saw the little girl.

I think that he reached such a place of histeria that he convinced himself that the baby was alive, hallucinating, to have a last strand of hope as he was dying. Notice how the baby is perfectly clean and well nourished, that would be impossible. The little girl is long gone and dead God knows in which floor but he convinced himself that he saw her as a way of also hoping that some kind of humanity is still left, that they wouldn't kill and eat an innocent and innocuous creature. But that's not the case.

Notice how he reaches the 333th floor and then walks like he doesn't even have a scar. Now multiply that number for each room residents, which are two. He's dead and has now reached Hell. There he finds his first roommate who's also in Hell since they both damned themselves letting their selfishness take over. The lady is obviously absent, since she never hurt a thing or specifically ate someone's flesh.

The baby was all part of his imagination and she doesn't reach the 0 level, simply because she was never there in the first place.

The girl could have been the message if she reached the top, since it would have proven how flawed the system is, but she never will. Some people claimed that it is not possible to reach the top because of how fast the platform goes, that it will just crash on the ceiling. I do not agree. There's no point in letting the platform crash each time so it will probably slow down enough to reach level 0, in facts we don't even know how tall level 1 is.

Someone also claimed that it's impossible that no one else ever reached the top through this method, which means to go all the way down to then come back up. First of all, it could have happened and that person could have been sent back down, but what I find most reasonable is that no one knows how deep the hole is, probably up to hell, and no one is brave enough to do it because no matter how bad your situation is, you're still afraid of having it worse. It's a suicidal mission which led to crazyness and then death even our brave characters.

Another reference I've loved is when it's mentioned that usually the poorest kill each other's to survive, while the richest have the highest rate of suicide. Why is that? Easy, they have nothing to endure, to live for, they have everything, they're not longing for the hope of food plus there's frightening in knowing that the next month it can only worsen.

So now the question remains: What is the ending then if the baby doesn't reach the top? The finale guys was right in front of our eyes, around the middle of the movie. Remember when the chef complains to other cooks about the hair in the pannacotta? That's the real ending: the pannacotta reaches the top (further proof that the platform won't crash) as the message but instead of being interpreted as a statement of insurrection, the level 0 workers believe it was sent back because there was a hair in there. This is the ultimate slap in the face, the final proof that those people are so out of touch, so blind towards what's happening downstairs that they think that was the issue, the hair in the pannacotta, without realizing that people are literally eating each others down there.

So, there was actually a satisfying finale which gave us answers, it's just that the finale was not at the end as usual.

[intotheclash]

il buco

“E se tu scruterai a lungo in un abisso,anche l’abisso scruterà dentro di te.” Nietzsche aveva ragione. Aveva ragione quasi sempre. Ed era proprio quello che mi stava succedendo in quel preciso momento. Fissavo quel piccolo buco nero proprio davanti a me, all’altezza degli occhi, a non più di un metro di distanza, lo fissavo e mi sentivo fissato. Tutti e due, io e il buco, incapaci di distogliere lo sguardo. Incatenati allo stesso destino. Come fossimo una cosa sola. Come se non esistesse nient’altro. Come se fossero state azzerate le alternative. Tutte le alternative. Sempre che, queste famose, e famigerate, alternative esistano davvero. Sempre che non siano soltanto una delle innumerevoli leggende metropolitane. Come i coccodrilli nelle fogne delle città, o le vipere buttate dagli elicotteri, o, ancora, i cinesi che non muoiono mai. Insomma, un qualcosa inventato da qualcuno per passare il tempo, o perché non riusciva a dormire, o, magari, unicamente per il piacere di inventare storie talmente inverosimili da risultare credibili. Pensandoci bene, senza distogliere lo sguardo dal buco, mi convinsi che le alternative davvero non esistono. E chi sostiene il contrario non fa altro che mentire a se stesso, e agli altri. Chi sostiene il contrario non fa altro che soffiare sul fuoco delle illusioni. Ma il buco, no. Quello non era un’illusione. Ed era ancora lì, davanti a me, e continuava a scrutarmi dentro, come un piccolo abisso. Era piccolo, lucido, ipnotico: un buio senza fine che intimava rispetto e metteva soggezione. Tuttavia non riusciva a scalfire la mia calma. Nonostante le fiammate di terrore che tentavano invano di mettermi in guardia. Nonostante le perle di sudore che, tracimando dai capelli, si ostinavano a scendere, con una lentezza esasperante, lungo la spina dorsale, quasi avessero l’ordine di contare le vertebre una per una. Il paesaggio circostante era stato azzerato. Come se una gigantesca mano pietosa avesse cancellato tutto con un’enorme colpo di spugna. Avrei potuto essere ovunque, in qualsiasi angolo di mondo. Non era importante il dove. Contava solo il buco. Solo quello era reale. Era diventato tutto il mio mondo. E avevo l’assoluta certezza che, prima o poi, mi avrebbe inghiottito. Il tempo era sospeso. Congelato. Immobile come un ragno che attende la sua preda. Mi accorsi subito di quel movimento silenzioso, quasi impercettibile, appena al di sotto del buco. Gli occhi lo catturarono all’istante e non ne furono contenti. Vidi il dito. Il dito e quella leggera pressione che stava esercitando sul grilletto. Udii lo scoppio nello stesso istante. E non riuscii a vedere più nulla. In realtà, questa è una mezza verità. Perché se è vero che gli occhi smisero di lavorare, qualcosa, all’interno della mia testa, era ancora capace di vedere, seppure per il tempo di un amen. E vidi me stesso e mia figlia, ancora piccola, che scivolavamo già per la ripida collina proprio di fronte al mio paese, nel primo giorno buono dopo una settimana di piogge torrenziali. “Vieni, andiamo a scivolare nel fango” le dissi. E fu proprio quello che facemmo. Arrivammo in fondo al crinale Irriconoscibili, ci alzammo in piedi e la guardai in viso. Aveva anche il viso interamente ricoperto da uno spesso strato di fango, ad eccezion fatta degli occhi, che brillavano di felicità, e della bocca, aperta a dismisura in un sorriso che mi tolse il fiato.