The American | Campo Imperatore — The High Plain That Makes a Car Look Alone

Between the killings, this film is mostly a man driving. A small Fiat on an empty road, the same road again and again, through a landscape with no billboards and no traffic — and a good deal of that emptiness is Campo Imperatore, the great upland plain on the southern shoulder of the Gran Sasso.

It is treeless grazing country between roughly 1,500 and 1,900 metres, crossed for centuries by the transhumance routes that moved sheep down to Puglia and back, and it has been standing in for other planets and other decades for fifty years of cinema. Italians call it Little Tibet. In September 1943, German paratroopers landed gliders on this grass to lift Mussolini out of the hotel that still sits at the end of the road.

For Corbijn it did something simpler than spectacle. Put a car on that plain and the car is alone in a way no city street can manage. Jack's paranoia stops being a character trait and becomes geography.

Drive up from Fonte Cerreto early, before the day-trippers, stop in the middle of the road — you can, nothing is coming — and get out. The silence is total, then a bell somewhere out in the grass, then nothing again. Give it fifteen minutes and you will start checking your mirrors too.

Photo: Fabrizio AM via Pexels (Pexels licence).