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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
LE QUATTRO VOLTE With its languorous panoramas and non-existent dialogue, Le Quattro Volte may be most suited to be projected on the white-washed wall of a hip New York restaurant, the film’s minimal sounds all but drowned out by the din. While the subject deserves an attentive viewing, the decorative filmmaking keeps our interest at a low hum. La Quattro Volte is the story, told through images, of an ancient Italian village forgotten by time. Perched on a mountain in Calabria, the ecosystem of this tiny part of the world seems to have stayed stagnant since the Middle Ages. Except for the occasional glimmer of blue jeans, even the villagers’ clothes are designed with timelessness in mind. The long shots of rustling trees and open fields are interrupted by an old shepherd, with barely enough breath left to lead his flock to pasture. The simple joy of watching his goats eases our discomfort in watching the ill man wheezing within the weeds. In one of the film’s few indoor settings, we see him drinking an ashy potion, made from dust swept from a church altar, before retiring in a sparse bedroom. His loneliness and detachment from the modern world are palpable and even unsettling. But the shepherd is not our protagonist. Like his goats, he’s just a natural part of the environment documented by the director Michelangelo Frammartino in an effort to understand the texture of nature, be it human, animal, plant, or mineral. The film later expands to a wider, more abstract focus on the organic ebb and flow of life: seasons change, life gives way to death, then a baby goat drops into the world (quiet literally, from the standing mother’s womb). The birth has a sudden ferocity that makes this moment the film’s most memorable, and certainly its least rehearsed. Aside from our old shepherd, the rest of the village is filmed as a unit, often from a distance, which makes a darkly dressed funeral procession look not so different than a herd of goats. And the behavior of the villagers is sometimes no more comprehensible. During a strange, centuries-old pagan festival, a towering fur tree is cut down from the forest, stripped of its branches and bark, and carried to the village square to be erected in a complicated ritual. It’s then toppled, chopped, and burned in a large earthen hearth covered with straw and clay. When it emerges, the once-living wood has become the coal needed to warm the village during the approaching winter. And just like that, life goes on. Le
Quattro Volte
is filmed like a documentary that is, in turn, filmed like a feature.
Though the recorded events are uneventful and unfocused, giving us every
impression that this is the documentation of real life, other shots are
too thought-out to be improvised, leaving us to wonder whether what we
have witnessed is artifice or serendipity. Overall, the film gives the
impression of a haphazard, untouched reality, but it also records this
reality from a hyper-artistic pictorial perspective. That the story is
fiction is the film’s greatest secret and its only truly unshakable note
of originality.
Yana Litovsky
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