Life itself is temporary.

Cinema through a viewfinder, a collision of past and future caught in a foggy haze. You can click through the fuzzy images but they remain at a distance, a beautiful and impossible world that seems to exist solely in the palm of your hand. Touch it and it crumbles, collapsing under its own weight, slipping through the fingers, sunlight dancing off of the falling sand as the impressions of a long forgotten existence fade away. Everything crumbles with it in this twilight landscape, a world out of time, everything slowly eroding, eaten away by entropy as something new threatens to take its place. Walls dusty like tombs, as if the sunlight could only exist for these brief moments. It all returns to the earth, eventually, no matter how much our inevitable wanton greed may attempt to disrupt the order of the universe. Outsiders in search of something that isn’t ours, clutching at memories while we stumble through this listless purgatory. Cogs in a cosmic machine that we can never understand, caught in its violent churning even when we attempt to reject its machinations.

“Were you dreaming? Sorry. You’ll never know how it ends now.” A smirking conductor behind a wispy fog of cigarette smoke wakes a mysterious, scruffy British man from a deep slumber in tune with the crashing rhythmic lull of the train. Everyone seems perplexed by his existence, the conductor puzzled by his unusual ticket, but Alice Rohrwacher never offers just what is so strange about it. Context is secondary in this dreamy realization of the sunny Tuscan countryside in the 1980s, awaking on a train with an arbitrary destination and meandering through the picturesque hills and the musty tombs beneath them. From the rounded, fuzzy corners of the warm 35mm frame to the interspersed 16mm haze it melts into an implacable phantasm.

Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is his own kind of impression of existence, a man who always seems just shy of dissipating into the chilled Italian night air. He exists out of place, and maybe even time, an ephemeral person who seems just slightly askew in every facet of his life. Just out of a prison sentence, he resides in a run down shack, attached to a steep cliff on the back of an ancient castle wall. He traffics in Etruscan antiquities stolen from their resting places in ancient tombs, a medium to the beyond drawn to the phantoms of the past, hoping he may one day encounter the ghost of a sun-drenched memory of lost love.

He stumbles through each day in a listless malaise, the kind of sunny despair that strikes an impossible chord between hopeful and hopeless, blending effervescent magical realism with the shattering loneliness of La Dolce Vita (1960). Arthur and everyone around him seem to exist in a state of purgatorial yearning, living in revelry under the golden sun, ever shy of achieving true comfort and warmth. His hapless band of tombaroli (Tuscan grave robbers) steal from the dead in an attempt to reclaim the property of the people, only to feed themselves back into the cycle of capital. In a world governed by profit there can be no rejection of its systemic roots. Wealthy fences govern disenfranchised thieves, elite curators of culture seek to cut it off from its people by generating mythological value, and the peace of the dead is corrupted by the sun.

Rohrwacher’s direction is slight and effortless, a dreamy meld of technique and structure that escapes definition and bends itself into brilliance through a veil of countryside laborer vignettes. Arthur glides through the dusty landscapes in an increasingly grubby linen suit, O’Connor’s fluctuating demeanor and rusty Italian speech straddling the line between a ruffian in fine, worn threads or someone who may have once been privileged enough to exist without trampling through the dirt in search of something lost. Rohrwacher isn’t trying to paint a portrait of heroes or villains; more one of a genuine struggle to find humanity in the corrosive confines of capital. It turns us all into finely threaded machinery, eventually. An effusive empathy escapes through Hélène Louvart’s lens, a loving vision of each smudge of dirt and cracked pot that combines with undercranked silent cinema-esque motion to form a truly unique aesthetic.

“Does it belong to everyone, or no one?” becomes the film’s enveloping thesis after the bubbly Italia (Carol Duarte) turns an abandoned train station into a functioning community of women raising their children without the oppressive presence of men or state. The only way to escape the crushing eternal confines of capital existence are to cast it aside completely. To return to the earth and become enveloped by its beauty. Surrounded by an expanse of glimmering moss and towering wildflowers; lost in the cerulean infinity of shimmering sand and vibrant water; sunken into the dark embrace of the earth itself. On the other side of these isolated paradises lies some intangible, impossible purity – a weightless love. Maybe we can belong to each other.

8/10