Le Quattro Volte

Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte is the third great film I have seen this month. (After Certified Copy and Uncle Bonmee...) It is a simple seeming film, a beautifully shot meditation on the landscape of southern Italy and some of the people and animals living there. It's divided into four parts, following first a goatherd and his goats; then a new born kid; then a tree, which is cut down and used for a festival; finally, the same tree being used to build a kiln for making charcoal. All four segments are about death - and transformation - man to animal, animal to plant, plant to mineral (as Frammartino puts it in this interview). Reincarnation - or resurrection - and I'd say it is a very fine film to watch on Easter weekend. (Being itself set, in part, at Easter...) It is, throughout, slow, quiet, patient, beautifully shot, and - like the other two great films - gorgeous sounding. A good part of what I said about the sound design of Certified Copy is true here - Frammartino immerses us in the world of this film through its sound. It's like the photography - deep, rich, detailed, multi-layered... It's also almost as important as the images in telling the story.

Now: it might tempting to say that this is a film without a plot - or without much of a plot. It's probably more accurate to say it has an unusual plot - that progression of souls (as it were) is a clear enough story line, though it is unconventional. The actual progression of scenes can also seem eventless - but isn't, not at all. It's striking how much does, in fact, happen. Something happens in every scene - we learn something about the village, the people and animals, and so on, in every scene. And in the first section, especially, every scene, almost every detail, builds a very careful, subtle, structure, that gets paid off at the end in spectacular fashion. You can say quite accurately, I think, that the entire first part of the film (following the old man and his goats, and his dog) is an elaborate gag worthy of Tati. It all builds to an Easter procession past the old man's house and goat pens - the dog interferes, is chased off by the romans - then tries to bully a lone altar boy, who tricks him by throwing a fake rock - leading the dog to find a real rock, which just happens to be holding back a parked truck. It is a cinematic tour de force - all played out in one shot (itself rather astonishing when you remember that it is an impeccably timed gag starring - and completely dependent on - a dog), and carefully using sound and sight to create the scene... That is delightful, but there is more - as we have seen all the steps taking place to create this situation. Like how the rock got there... and so on. And - probably why the dog is so aggressive - the old man is nowhere to be seen in this scene - he should have had his goats out on the hillside by this time - that he doesn't is significant...

Over all - to me, this film played like a mix of Tati and Olmi - slow, quiet, patient, but carefully constructed, impeccably made, funny little humanist adventures, that, small as their scale might seem to be, feel perfectly epic in their conception. A joy, from top to bottom.