Surrounding Rome like “the rings around Saturn”, the Grande Raccordo Anulare (GRA) is the grandest road in Italy. But just because Saturn’s rings are impressive and pretty, it doesn’t mean Saturn is really the nicest place to live.
The same applies to those areas around the GRA, and it is these desolate, joyless places that Sacro GRA explores.
Sacro GRA is an intimate documentary that is made up of a series of almost soundless, naturalistic snapshots of everyday life. Directed by Gianfranco Rosi, respected Italian documentary filmmaker, Sacro GRA is the first documentary to ever win the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. It’s easy to see why, as it is a beautifully shot and well-crafted film with a peculiar sense of the surreal to it.
Car crashes are juxtaposed against radio-control cars racing on a miniature track. An eel farmer complains about the introduction of African eels into Italian waters while his family make nets in complete silence around him. Strippers dance on the bar of a club as twenty-somethings take shots of a drink that is an unhealthy shade of blue. These disparate scenes are all connected by the ever-present noise of cars running on the GRA. Thanks to the GRA, the scenes all become intertwined and connected, representing how roads connect hundreds of thousands of unique human lives.
Something that sets Sacro GRA apart from other documentaries is its use of unconventional camerawork. Early on, we watch numerous family members discussing the day from outside their upper-story windows, looking down on and into their private lives. It’s almost as if the camera is a floating spirit, quietly watching life go on while remaining high above all the troubles of the world. Gianfranco does a fantastic job at capturing the most mundane things and turning them into something beautiful and fascinating.
What I do find hard to deal with, something I find with many movies of its kind, is that for all the beauty and fascinating imagery it remains fairly empty. Many filmmakers seem to think that silence, or at least relative quiet, brings with it a sense of profoundness or classiness, but sometimes all it brings with it is boredom. I can definitely understand and appreciate what Rosi was trying to accomplish by keeping a lot of dialogue and music out of the film, but in some scenes the silence just becomes overbearing and you might as well just be looking at photographs rather than sitting through a movie. They may be pretty photographs featuring exciting subjects, but you need something more to get through an hour and a half.
Sacro GRA finishes with a shot of multiple CCTV screens displaying cars and trucks driving down the road at night, before quickly cutting to credits. Nothing is wrapped up, nothing is explained, but somehow that’s enough, at least, enough for this film. Sacro GRA is not a fantastically engaging film, but it is a charming, almost relaxing, fly-on-the-wall documentary.
Sacro GRA screens on 18 October, 1:45pm
Reviewed by James Rudd
Rating out of 10: 6
The Lavazza Italian Film Festival runs from 2 – 22 October 2014 exclusively at the Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas.
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