As Sacro GRA presents, life in Rome ebbs and flows around the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the great ring road that circles the city. The film’s title dubs the highway holy, and though it may not inspire fervour in those that frequent it, parallels can be drawn. It too gives as well as takes, and remains a mainstay even when disregarded. Its role in Roman existence is influential, as evidenced by the many in its orbit. Some speed along, others saunter to the side, and many simply observe.
Sans narration and with only brief introductory intertitles for context, director Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary does the same: watching over the road, and waiting for the action – whether scant or scandalous – to manifest. If there’s a statement to be made outside of the movie’s moniker, the film proffers that the multiplicity of modern Rome can be encapsulated by the comings and goings upon its central thoroughfare. To illustrate the point, the feature flits between vastly varying slices of life to piece together a patchwork of the city’s activity. This is an effort comfortable to gaze at people and places.
Filmed over two years, the snapshots are diverse and diverting, honing in on eccentricities. A recurrent sequence shows the frenzy of ambulance workers careening along the night-time expanse with sirens blazing as they attend to the many traffic accidents that plague the motorway; in contrast, another intercut segment patiently sits with an elderly eel fisherman living by the river as he tries to make a living and complains, extensively, about inaccurate media coverage. Their treatment is similarly distinct, matching their respective energies. Treading the streets to see prostitutes ply their trade, entering a well-appointed space rented out for films and photography shoots, and witnessing weathered coffins rehoused from crypts to graves, are all rendered in the same differing manner befitting their specific content.
Most striking is a series of Rear Window-esque glimpses inside the windows of roadside apartment dwellers, each framed identically to peer from outside and above into modest homes, and once again canvassing variety. Families share problems, sew, spin records, and simply stare at the road below. Indeed, shots showing these high-rise inhabitants scrutinising their surroundings comprise the film’s most poignant components, a clear symbol of the feature’s simple function. The documentary looks in on their private moments, and, without passing judgement, they look back.
Perhaps more than most documentaries, the question of how and why those seen within Sacro GRA’s frames were selected proves a purposeful puzzle, no obvious answer evident other than dissimilarity. Each vignette is affecting and even intermittently amusing, whether showing the tentative living of transients living in their car, or delving into the passion of a palm tree expert; however in depicting masses crowding to see a sign from the Virgin Mary, and bar-top dancers being ogled by drunken revellers, the reality that each snippet remains wholly interchangeable with the likely many analogous tales not chosen is inescapable.
Ultimately, it is form rather than function that immerses in the first documentary to ever win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Sacro Gra is an evident technical feat, even if its contemplation of juxtaposition never satisfyingly lingers. Capturing the sounds and sights of the six-lane, 70-kilometre stretch is achieved with consummate skill and appropriately unassuming style, Rossi’s latest dissection of everyday ordinariness after the comparable Boatman and Below Sea Level delicate in its cinematography and dextrous in its editing. No lasting imprint is left, but a multifaceted panorama of Roman life is constructed.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Sacro GRA
Director: Gianfranco Rosi
Italy / France, 2013, 95 mins
Italian Film Festival 2014
http://www.italianfilmfestival.com.au/
Melbourne: 17 September – 12 October
Sydney: 18 September – 12 October
Canberra: 23 September – 15 October
Perth: 24 September – 15 October
Brisbane: 1 – 22 October
Adelaide: 2 – 22 October
Byron Bay: 9 – 15 October
Hobart: 16 – 22 October
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