Pompei: Below the Clouds

               

Gianfranco Rosi's Pompei: Below the Clouds is an elegant portrait of Naples. Unlike Rosi's previous documentaries such as Fire at Sea, Rosi shot this documentary in black and white. The high contrast beauty of the photography lends itself to the theme of timelessness in the film. A modern city under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, the environs of Naples boast some of the world's most storied ruins and Roman antiquities and Rosi conveys the manifold glimpses of eternity the city contains. The film has no narration, but follows a disparate group of people as they work, relax, and learn. We visit a 911 call center and a study hall monitored by an aged tutor. We see a team of preservationists tunneling below the surface of the earth to witness ancient sites where antiquities have been looted by thieves. We witness a team of Japanese archaeologists excavating a site. We see a team of Syrian sailors offload a shipment of Ukrainian grain from a gigantic hold in their ship; another of the film's many excavations. 

Rosi takes us to an abandoned cinema where films, that range from Rodolfi's The Last Days of Pompeii to Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, are projected that allude to the famous eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and its aftermath. The gorgeousness of the imagery in ...Below the Clouds left me so stupefied that it almost upended my critical facilities, but Rosi also manages to show that Naples is a gritty modern day seaport with its attendant problems. This bifurcation enables the film to take its place alongside such trenchant excavations of Naples as Curzio Malaparte's The Skin and Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples: A City's Unseen History. 

Dust Bunny

Mads Mikkelsen

Bryan Fuller's Dust Bunny, his feature film debut, was released in the US on December 5th on four hundred screens and was pretty much out of theaters by Christmas. Lionsgate must have felt it was too quirky for a big market success, but Lionsgate's marketing strategies for all their 2025 were extremely misguided. Furthermore, Dust Bunny is an R rated film that will appeal best to perverse ten year olds. Maybe it will be a cult film one day, on the level of Buckeroo Banzai or Labyrinth, but it is too weird to be a blockbuster. Fuller, the show runner of Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, and American Gods, already has betrayed the hallmarks of an auteur in his television work. The mordant humor and surreal touches of his television work are much in evidence in Dust Bunny.

The film is a fable with the moral that we all carry a monster within. The titular monster emerges each night from under the bed of Aurora, an eight year old in New York City played by Sophie Sloan in deadpan Wednesday Addams mode. After losing successive sets of parents to the dust bunny, Aurora hires a unnamed hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) who lives in her apartment building to eliminate her problem. The hit man has problems of his own, Aurora has witnessed him killing a dragon (of sorts) in Chinatown, and is disinclined to believe her. Between action sequences, Aurora and the stone faced assassin work out their problems and gain mutual trust. Young Ms. Sloan is fine, it is almost always a good idea to direct young performers towards the deadpan, but Mr. Mikkelsen carries the film. A major film star of this century, Mikkelsen carries on the heroic tradition of stoic machismo embodied by Wayne, Eastwood, and Max von Sydow. 

Dust Bunny is visually vigorous for a film primarily set in a New York apartment. Every effort has been made, by CGI and practical effects, to highlight the fairytale nature of the project. The apartment building is baroquely appointed with rooms decorated in bold colors. The view of New York from Aurora's room is a tribute to the old fashioned art of matte painting. The unreality of the film allows us follow the childlike logic of a fable. We know, as we did when we were little tots, that such tales involve peril, but that the protagonist will emerge triumphant in the end. I also enjoyed Isabella Summers' score and, particularly, the use of Sister Jane Mead's recording of The Lord's Prayer. This 1973 hit, it reached number four, I had blissfully forgotten, but Fuller uses it to full comic effect in a scene in which Aurora steals a brimming collection plate  from a church in order to pay the hitman. Whether Dust Bunny is a one-off or a start to a film directing career, I salute Fuller's audacity. The picture is slight, but lovingly crafted. Dust Bunny also features Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and Sheila Atim.

Die My Love

 

Jennifer Lawrence on all fours in Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love is my favorite bad movie of the year. The film is an adaptation of the brilliant Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz's slim first novel Malate amor. This tale of a new wife and mother coming undone was originally set in rural France, but Ms. Ramsay and her two talented co-writers have transposed the drama to North America with Alberta standing in for Montana. Not that the picture seems particularly American even with US icons like Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in the cast. No matter, the tale of a traumatized woman mentally unraveling suits Ms. Ramsay's astringent feminism, but also shows her limitations.

Grace (Jennifer Lawrence), the protagonist, never adjusts to domesticity with her new spouse (Robert Pattinson) and baby. Montana is her husband's territory and the couple move into the abandoned home of a relative of his, who we will eventually learn has committed suicide. The house is fairly isolated, so the attending alienation only exacerbates Grace's post partum depression. The picture suffers from portentousness, however. A mysterious motorcycle rider ( a wasted LaKeith Stanfield) and wild black horse too patly portend Grace's desire for freedom from domestic bonds. Soon, she is barking at the dog, acting horny, scurrying around on all fours, and discarding her clothes at the drop of a hat. I thought the picture should have been called Diary of a Mad and Feral Katniss.

Ramsay pounds us over the head with this theme, but fails to visually express the atavism of her material. We never feel the unconscious pull that guides Grace to the forest for her eventual annihilation. The overly placid adaptation of Train Dreams suffers from this same fault, but, at least, Ramsay can never be accused of being an overly placid director. I suspect she is more suited to urban material. Ramsay plays up the sick house horror of the home, but it flattens the supporting characters into Gothic schtick reminiscent of, and this is not meant as a compliment, Sam Shepherd's Curse of the Starving Class. Pattinson suffers the most from this. A fine actor, he is so misdirected that he comes off as a cartoon: just a pretty boy in a trucker hat. As with her performance in Mother!, Ms. Lawrence almost redeems an arty misfire. She gives a committed performance that gives us the unhinged madness the rest of the picture lacks. She has displayed her lack of inhibition as a performer before, but never with such ferocity.