OPEN ROADS: NEW ITALIAN CINEMA - ISABELLA TORRE: BASILEIA (2024)

Greedy treasure hunter arouses mother nature's ire

TRAILER

With Basileia Isabella Torre is said to be returning to the theme of her first short film, Ninfe (Nymphs), which was presented in 2018 in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. And she shows a fascination with exploring the interface between everyday reality and an invisible world of darkness and the occult and magical. This film is partly an archeological theft thriller, partly a spooky ghost tale, partly a sort of ecological warning. But it never quite finds its rhythm in any of these modes, and is a tryng experience to watch.

A problem is the unsympathetic and irritating protagonist, a local explorer not particularly welcome in this part of the Italian South (Calabria and the Aspromonte mountains). He is known as L'Irlandese (the Irishman), when asked says he's a Scott, but in fact is played by Danish actor Elliott Crosset Hove of Godland. The Irishman is persistent in trying to bag a buried treasure he calls a "box" but keeps failing. He is injured and his presumably illegal helpers get caught in a raid of their dig by the carabinieri and his rich local sponsor, "Signor Santo," seizes the mysterious manuscript "notebook" he has been relying on, and has him kept at a nunnery. He calls someone and talks to him in Danish (I guess), showing he's perhaps conspiring with someone far away. He escapes from the clutches of Signor Santo, takes off in a car, and by the roadside hires a mysterious jobless local Burkinabé dude known as KeyKey (Koudous Seihon). But he flounders at his second effort after a second assistant hired by KeyKey, Igor, disappears. For KeyKey, not to mention Igor, he proves an unreliable and badly paying employer.

I missed Arthur, the amiable scoundrel of an archeological grave robber played by Josh O'Connor with much seedy charm and dedication in Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera. (NYFF 2023). None of that film's rich humanity or sense of the actual is captured here, nor any compensating sense of the supernatural. Since this is a film that seeks to be intriguingly withholding, I missed the way that quality works successfully in De Pallières' Adieu and Claire Denis' famous The Intruder.

Meanwhile there are the nude women with waist-length hair who wander about, making jerky head movments. Their makeup reminded me of the big-eyed creatures in W.A.Dwiggins' illustrations for H.G.Wells' The Time Machine. The locals seem to take them in stride, but the local village appears to be a ghost town anyway, except where it isn't, in the case of a church with a minister, the nunnery, and a herd of goats and a goatherd (apparently played by editor and producer Jonas Carpignano). Oh and there are the wolf hounds that prowl into an abandoned house in the opening sequence - a moment whose spookiness and energy are not lived up to, unless the rather lame naked ladies do that for you. If they are representing the invisible world of darkness and the occult, they are overburdened.

There is an effective horror-movie score by Andrea De Sica that raises the pitch from time to time, and sometmes ambient sound is well used. But there is not a well-shaped storyline to make use of this. Consequently the theme Torre wants to develop - that you don't want to mess with mother nature - doesn't come alive. The filmmaker has assembled many elements here, however, including a church service and villagers who pray for those who have disappeared. The final moments are beautiful, but inconclusive. Perhaps Ari Aster, if he went back to horror, could do something with all this. The trailer is great (see above). But you need to reassemble the elements better into a movie.

Basileia, 88 mins., premiered at Venice asthe closing film of Venice Days, Sept. 6, 2024. Screened for this review as part of FLC/CineCitta’s Open Roads Italian series at Lincoln Center (May 29-Jun. 5, 2025). Showtimes:
Friday, May 30 at 9:00pm

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.