Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful and challenging film. It has a light narrative structure, but feels more like an experimental art piece than anything particularly plot-driven. It relies entirely on the beautiful cinematography of Andrea Locatelli, employing no score and no dialogue. The sound we hear is created by the natural situations we witness: a truck driving up a hill, the bells of a herd of goats as well as their collective bleating, a crowd of people getting together in a village square for a celebration. This is a very slow-moving film, but is quite lyrical and interesting.
It opens with an old goat herder walking with his sheep in the hills in rural Italy. He has a terrible cough and stops his work to hack away for awhile. When he gets home, he mixes an unknown substance into a glass of water. The next day as he makes his rounds in the village delivering milk he picks up a pack of dust from the church after a nun has blessed it (this dust is what he drank in the water the night before). Later we follow a goat kid from its birth to its first trip out with the flock into the hills, where it gets separated from the group because it can't keep up. Finally we see the villagers cut a tall tree and put it up in the square for a celebration. The tree is taken down and burned to make charcoal.
These little episodes all deal with the cycle of life and relative life-spans for each kind of being (a man, an animal and a tree). It seems the title (The Four Times, in English) refers to a theory of Pythagoras that life has four stages from beginning to end: human, animal, plant and mineral. I have to admit, I caught the four parts, but it's still rather cryptic (and had to look up the meaning after I saw the film... I'm a cheater).
I was struck a few times over the course of the picture about how much it reminded me of some of the more exotic fare of Tarkovsky, notably his Solaris from 1972. Clearly that is a story mostly set in space, but it deals with ontology in an interesting, abstract way. This connection was particularly clear to me with the way Frammartino uses shots of natural textures to fill the screen expressively between more narrative moments. Even though it is stylistically very different from Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi (there's no music, the shots don't have much movement in them at all), they both share a similar poetic quality.
This is not an easy film, but it is interesting and beautiful. It's not often a film can capture your attention for 88 minutes without nearly any sound. This one does.
Stars: 3 of 4
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