Quattro volte

A+

Mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness ... in a fascinating offbeat art-house creation.

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How much of cinema's status as an art form depends on cinematography? Films with little dialogue and many images blur definitions, as Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times) does. An NYT critic thought the Italian movie "reinvents the very act of perception", which amounts to a warning to be prepared for mind-boggling cinematic pretentiousness.

As with his debut feature, The Gift (2003), writer-director Michelangelo Frammartino went on location in Calabria for his 2010 docudrama. In the first segment of the quartet of episodes, an old goatherd subsists on the fringe of a medieval town clustered atop a steep hunchback hill. He dies (after 40 minutes), and the next focal point is a newborn goat, whose fumbling infancy is observed for 20 minutes until it loses itself and goes to sleep (or death) amid the roots of an ancient fir tree.

The tree is cut down by the townspeople for an annual festival, sporting a stark tree canopy far above the town's roofs. Then it is chopped up and added to an intricately constructed charcoal oven (seen in full smoky operation in the movie's pre-title opening sequence). The charcoal is distributed, and smoke rises, as it has intermittently during the film, from a chimney on the town's roofscape.

Are the four segments a cycle of reincarnation? Or facets of the divine comedy of human life and vast variety of nature? Or, as a cynic might suspect, one shortish dramatic film with a trio of scenic documentary shorts deployed to double the overall length to one closer to that of a full feature.

The old man's story is an exquisitely composed slow-paced non-speaking parade of set pieces, a storyboard movie that turns fine photographic images into moving pictures. Many are bewitching, such as those illustrating the goatherd's ritual potions of holy dust and his awareness of an ant crossing his face. One long-pan depiction of a barking herd dog causing a runaway lorry to unloose the goats is a wonderful comic compilation, delightfully plotted and stage-managed. Similarly, the goat kids' gambols are deftly-edited, delightful documentary fun.

The lack of dialogue and background music is no handicap: attention is focused on the dogs' barks, the goats' bleats, their clanking bells, the occasional lorry trip, the dying herder's coughs.

This movie may not warrant four viewings, but a second is deserved: cinematographer Andrea Locatelli is another young talent well boosted by this offbeat art-house creation.