Christ Stopped at Eboli represents a majestic deviation, an anomaly in Francesco Rosi's career that confirms his greatness. Here, Rosi does not attack his subject as he usually does in his investigative cinema, but absorbs it. He abandons chronicle to embrace anthropology, leaving the structure of the political thriller to adopt the long, almost immobile time of elegy. Adapting Carlo Levi's seminal memoir, Rosi produces a hypnotically slow work, originally conceived for television (an essential production detail), which uses its long duration not for narration but for permanence. It is a film that breathes the white dust of arid Lucania and lets it settle on the viewer.

The film rests on one of the most intelligent and counter-intuitive casting choices in Italian cinema. Entrusting the role of Carlo Levi to Gian Maria Volonté means taking the actor-symbol of political cinema, the man of anger, denunciation, and volcanic performance (Indagine su un cittadino, La classe operaia va in paradiso), and forcing him into stillness. Volonté's Levi is a role of pure subtraction. He is an intellectual from Turin, a doctor, painter, anti-fascist, catapulted (in 1935) into a world he does not know and that does not know him. The genius of his interpretation lies in observation. For almost four hours, Volonté watches. His performance is a filter, a witness. He is reason opposed to magic, the man of history immersed in a place where history has never arrived. His task is not to act, but to understand. He is an anthropologist sent into the field against his will, and Rosi uses his cultured face and quiet despair as our only window into an alien universe.

This universe is Gagliano, the fictitious name of Aliano, a cluster of white houses on top of eroded hills, the calanchi. Pasqualino De Santis's photography is a masterpiece of aridity. There is nothing picturesque or touristy about this Lucania. It is a lunar landscape, almost abstract, a purgatory of white clay and relentless sun. It is a geographical place that has become a metaphysical condition: isolation. The title, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” is the key to understanding: Eboli was the last stop on the railway. Beyond that, there is no more state, no more religion (the institutional, Christian kind), no more “civilization” as Levi understands it. There are only the peasants. Rosi films them, often with non-professional actors, without romanticism. They are poor, sick (malaria is everywhere), distrustful, tied to pagan rituals and a magic that predates Christianity. They are not “anti-fascists”; they are pre-fascists. For them, Mussolini's regime is only the latest in a thousand-year series of abstract and distant masters, as incomprehensible as a drought.

The film is an investigation, but the subject is not a crime. The subject is the “Southern Question” in its purest form. Rosi and Levi (the film is a constant dialogue between the two authors) analyze the irreparable rift between the Italian state and the “Real Country.” Politics is represented by the local petty bourgeoisie: the podestà (Paolo Bonacelli), the two local doctors (who refuse to treat the poor), the priest. They are grotesque, petty figures, more imprisoned than the peasants themselves, entrenched in their petty fascist privileges. Levi, the confined intellectual, becomes a disruptive element not because of his ideas, but because of his humanity. When, overcoming his own reluctance, he agrees to practice medicine for the peasants, he performs the most political act of all: he builds a bridge. He uses his knowledge not to dominate, but to serve. His diagnosis of malaria is not only medical; it is a social diagnosis of a state that has abandoned its citizens.

The episodic structure, inherited from television and the book itself, allows Rosi to avoid any melodramatic shortcuts. There is no real climax. There is an accumulation of experiences: the encounter with the housekeeper Giulia (Irene Papas), a figure of witch and priestess, the perfect synthesis of that magical world; the dialogues with the other political prisoners, who dream of an Italy that does not exist; Levi's attempts to paint, to capture a reality that escapes rational logic. The greatness of Christ Stopped at Eboli lies in its quiet monumentality. It is a film that requires patience and rewards with depth. It is Rosi's observation, made in 1979 (in another fractured Italy, that of the Years of Lead), that two countries coexist on the same peninsula without ever touching each other. Levi will leave, forgiven and called back to the North, but his experience has changed him forever. He arrived as a man who believed in History and left having encountered Myth.