Le Quattro Volte (G). Director: Michelangelo Frammartino. 84 minutes
The Italian word 'volte' evokes not just the noun 'time', but also the verbs to 'merge', 'become' or 'transform'. All connotations are relevant here. Le Quattro Volte floats on the passage of the seasons, and the minute progressions of time in a timeless Calabrian village. Philosophically, it considers change and growth as almost sacramental aspects of earthly existence.
The overarching narrative follows a metaphysical path, as a soul progresses through four states of being: from human, to animal, to plant, to mineral. But this virtually dialogue-free film is not fixated on esotery. Quite the opposite: the camera's still, gently inquisitive gaze finds magic in the mundane, and humour and meaning in the everyday events of village life.
An elderly goatherd walks the village's steep, rutted streets, delivering vessels of milk to his neighbours. He's beset by a vicious cough, which he soothes with a concoction of water and ash from church altar candles. His eventual death coincides with the birth of a goat, which takes up the mantle as the film's central character, and is surprisingly, wonderfully anthropomorphised.
The theme is of reincarnation, but not devaluation. The goat's life is not less than the man's.
This idea is carried further: eventually, the goat 'becomes' a tree, which, placed at the centre of ritualised festivities in the village, is celebrated in a way neither man nor goat was in life. And the reverential pyrolytic process to which its timber is later subjected imbues the resultant charcoal with an almost religious significance.
The film is full of ideas, which director Frammartino allows the viewer to discover through contemplation. Notably, it subtly chastises religious institutions that fail to meet the basic needs of human beings. This is implicit in the hollow booming that is the only result of the sickly goatherd's urgent knocking on the church door on the night before his death.
This image makes a sad irony of the man's simple faith in the healing power of the ash he earlier swept off the church floor.
Frammartino finds a more epic metaphor for the vacuity of religious ritual if divorced from human reality. A Passion play taking place outside the village is juxtaposed with a slapstick comedy-of-errors that occurs simultaneously within it. The two scenarios are linked by the shuttling movements of a barking dog, and by the camera, which pans between them like an intrigued onlooker. The effect is