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.

Consequences of love

From its ten nominations for the 2005 Italian film industry's Davids, The Consequences of Love (2004), won five top awards: film, director and screenplay (a trio for Paolo Sorrentino), cinematography (Luca Bigazzi) and actor (Toni Servillo). Its editing, sound, music and lead supporting actor were worthy nominees too, and for its first 45 minutes this movie was heading straight into the top rating level.

A middle-aged heavy-smoking Italian businessman has rented a Swiss hotel room for eight years. He sits in the hotel lounge, writes notes to himself, utters off-screen thoughts, eavesdrops on his impoverished neighbours, plays cards with them, is a creature of habits : weekly heroin, periodic blood transfusions, frequent money laundering trips, constant dispassionate stares at the world around him. It includes the hotel barmaid, who seems to be fascinated by him, and his estranged wife and three adult children, who hate to even talk to him on the telephone.

The writer-director's plot and character developments are finely paced, slowly but with exquisite, beguiling framing and depth of colour. He seems to exist only to receive suitcases of US dollars from an unknown woman, and drive them in a private car to a private bank. The overall concept and treatment appears to be a stylish precursor of The American, in which George Clooney played a similar foreign man of mystery.

Then, with increasing lack of credibility, Sorrentino injects a rash of overblown subplots. Wild threads, some leading to tangled loose ends, others tied up risibly with illogical acts by the anti-hero and his Mafia bosses and their brutal underlings.

Actor-director Servillo also starred in Il Divo, winning another Best Actor David on 2009 (having won it the previous year as well for The Girl By the Lake). He was a star turn too in Gomorrah: his facial tics and tiny smiles could launch a thousand screenplays.

With restraints on his writing imagination, Sorrentino could win greater glory as an exceptional movie director. Sorrentino's subsequent films include L'Amico di famiglia (2006) and Il Divo (2008), both highly-rated and worth seeing saspo.

I am love

Food is a favourite film fetish, as I Am Love (Io sono l'amore) reminds its audience fitfully.

A mansion-inhabiting rich Milanese industrialist's Russian-born wife (Tilda Swinton) meets her son's bearded friend, a chef (Eduardo Gabbriellini), during a grand Yuletide family dinner (he's baked a birthday cake for father-in-law's retirement day). The story moves to springtime, when an eggplant and elderflower appetizer convinces the son to back the chef's planned rustic restaurant near San Remo. Mother is soon excited by the chef's freshly blow-torched biscuit (for son's engagement party), and then cinematically and orally ravished by a luscious, artfully lit prawn dish (at the chef's city restaurant).

With one son engaged, her daughter's lesbianism suddenly revealed, and her marriage in a state of polite stupor, the mother is clearly primed for a full meal of sensuality. When she and the chef visit his farmland, the audience is only shown a quick blurred kiss, followed by a cut to black and Swinton portraying a feast of facial delight.

Her next course is a business dinner menu discussion (an excuse for the duo to have a day together in the wilds of close-up shots of insects and plants), which leads to a Russian fish soup (whose serving confirms the son's suspicion about his mother's fidelity, and results in his death in the family's swimming pool).

Highly symbolic Italian melodrama, the movie was reportedly a project in the minds of co-producers Swinton and writer-director Luca Guadagnin ever since they'd worked together on the 1999 London-set murder-docudrama The Protagonists. In 2002 the Sicilian movie-maker and Scottish actress made a documentary short, Tilda Swinton: The Love Factory. By then, Cambridge grad Swinton had her breakthrough role in fellow-Scot Danny Boyle's The Beach (2000). Sidestepping from UK art-house movies (honing her talent with Derek Caravaggio Jarman and Sally Orlando Potter) and European indies to the mainstream (the Narnia franchise), she won a Golden Globe (Best Actress, 2001, The Deep End) and BAFTA and Oscar Best Supporting Actress awards (Michael Clayton, 2008) and gained further recognitions for Julia (in France) and Burn After Reading (for the Coen brothers).

The redhead's distinctive chiseled features suited modern audiences' appreciation of bony beauty -- Cate Blanchett, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Gwynneth Paltrow among others following in the footsteps of such angular actors as Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Mia Farrow and Helen Mirren. (In reality, maybe Monroe, Gardner, Bacall and other voluptuous beauties were exceptions rather than standard models.)

Swinton is, as always, a pleasure to watch, as are many of the movie's locations (particularly the family mansion). Some supporting roles are good (Pippo Delbono as the frosty husband, Maria Paiato as the loyal housekeeper, veteran Marisa Berenson as the matriarch); the second son is a redundant character and the Sikh Indian-American M&A financier is a ludicrous distraction. Saddest of all, food fetishists don't have enough on which to feast their eyes and imaginations.

Mid-August lunch

Gianni Di Gregorio was almost 60 in 2008, and the Italian only had a few movie industry credits. They began a decade earlier when he worked as an assistant director and small-part actor on Matteo Garrone's Guests, the indie writer-director's award-winning docudrama about Albanian immigrants.

Di Gregorio became an occasional member of Garrone's movie-making team, most notably when he co-wrote the screenplay of Gomorrah, a docudrama tragicomic study of Italian criminals. It garnered 40 award nominations (including the 2008 Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Foreign Film) and 23 wins.

Garrone produced Di Gregorio's debut writing-directing feature, a short (70-minute) tale about four very old ladies, which also premiered in 2008. The low-budget movie, filmed in the apartment where Garrone had taken care of his own ageing mother, is an Italian equivalent of Mike Leigh's British docudramas. It uses natural light, unflattering close-ups, non-professional actors and well-planned improvisations to depict the lives of ordinary people reacting to special situations.

Di Gregorio kept his budget very low by casting himself as the late-middle-aged man housekeeping and cooking for his spirited nonagenarian mother. His apartment building's manager and doctor both ask him to erase his debts to them by looking after their mothers too during Italy's mid-August public holiday (Ferragosto). One of them brings her sister along, filling his small home with a quartet of very individualistic old ladies.

He prepares meals for and with them, handles their temper tantrums, gets help from a drinking buddy on the farewell lunch, and happily agrees to extend the rejuvenated visitors' holiday. The fable steers clear of sentimentality, allowing the old women to show personality flaws and facial antiquity. Their gathering turns into a seniors' pyjama party without being overly cute or artificially comic. This isn't an Italian Golden Girls, but neither is it earnest neo-realism. Well photographed, edited and designed, this could have also been an old-style BBC TV drama.

Gregorio found two of the old ladies in his family and the other two in an old folks' home. He is a charming, convincing central figure for their narrative, and it's hoped he and the Garrone team are able to make other indie movies that illustrate real Italian lifestyles.

Baaria

I really should find out how the Golden Globes organisers choose their nominees. Especially their Foreign-Language Film choices. Then I might know why they thought Baaria was one of the best five non-English-language movies of 2009.

The Oscars organisers have a system. Each non-English-speaking country/territory in the world (even North Korea, perhaps) can offer its national favourite of the year to Hollywood. There are restrictions regarding the sources of production funds, amount of non-national talent employed, theatre screenings, and, one can guess, various etcs that enable all concerned to keep out global cinematic riff-raff.

The manner in which each country chooses its candidate is undoubtedly as Byzantine as Olympic Games committees. Many classics of global cinema have been spurned because their directors or producers were out of favour with the decision-making mafiosi of their nation's movie industry.

Oscar's self-chosen clique of Foreign-Film academicians then decide which five options they think should be offered to the Oscar segment's electors. These include only the academy members who reportedly promise to see all five candidates. Even non-Byzantine conspiracy theorists will detect lots of opportunities for a Hollywood version of race-fixing.

Once upon a time, for a very long time, most of the Academy members able to make the effort of going to see five sub-titled movies must have been retired and old. Most of them would have been migrants, or post-War relatives of migrants, from Europe. They were all sentimentalists.

I have not yet proved my contention by tedious review of the facts, but I suspect that the off-balance demographics of the Foreign-Film electorate led to woefully predictable nominees and victors. "And the winner" would often be a schmaltzy movie with a cute pre-pubescent child or two, heart-warming grand-parental or avuncular figures, left-wingish anti-authoritarian attitudes, generation gaps that melt in the glow of fond memories and cherished dreams, and an entertainment industry connection.

That is possibly how the 1989 tale of a rustic Italian movie-house, Cinema Paradiso, won the Oscar (and the equivalent BAFTA award in the UK). It didn't hurt its chances when its old star died soon after production (or was that another Italian multi-award-winner about a rustic postman and poet? Or another dead actor's final appearance?). More research is needed : how many dying actors soon rested in peace under Foreign-Language tombstones?

Finally, back to Baaria, whose only connection to all the above is its director, Guiseppe Tornatore, who also created Cinema Paradiso. He's Sicilian, and that island's sons have the same right as anyone to make embarrassingly saccharine confections. In Baaria, he clearly wanted to produce an epic tale covering his life span, the history of his once self-contained town (now a suburb of Palermo), three generations, local fascists and communists, and a lot more.

The movie takes well over 2 hours to present a very confusing pageant of different generations of bambini and over-excited crowd scenes. Thousands of extras and massive Sicilian urban settings (recreated on location in Tunisia) are remorsefully presented in idolatrous golden-glowed wide-screen hyper-activity. Cameras run hither and thither, like the fidgety townsfolk. Ennio Morricone's over-loud music is similarly sensually offensive, and everybody on every set constantly screams and shouts in the OTT troppo way excitable Sicilians are supposed to, if that's what their auteur likes.

Were all Italian movies so histrionic and high-pitched? In fairness to a nation of people who, though vociferous, actually communicate, and very delightfully, with their hands and eyes, real research was needed. First of all, via Rossellini, who is another story.