The travails of a Calabrian spirit through four earthly forms makes for a unique and captivating meditation on existence in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le quattro volte.
For audience members who miss the beats in Frammartino’s wordless narrative, the film will be a frustrating, interminable parade of pretty images and well-staged but pointless setups. But those attuned to the quartet of inter-related shorts that capture profoundly the integration of a spiritual entity with its Calabrian community surrounds – will be swept up in its warmth and its 'ashes-to-ashes’ existential symmetry.
The opening act details the daily routine of an elderly, ailing goat-herder. He coughs incessantly, each hack draining a little more life from him. He collects ash from the local church, which he mixes with water as a night time elixir. His few earthly possessions consist of his goat herd and trusty sheepdog – a combination that, ironically, sets in motion the events of the old man’s final hours. This sequence, an extended single shot that takes in the staging of a Roman passion play procession, the astonishing antics of the dog and the accidental release of the goat herd from their pen, is an accomplished piece of filmmaking.
The elderly man’s passing leads to the film’s most captivating sequence, formed around the short life of a young goat. From its graphic birth, Frammartino’s static camera captures the kid (whose bleating continues the audio cues established by the man’s cough) as he frolics with the flock; the director’s skill at subtly anthropomorphising the goat’s personality is a joy to watch. Upon being separated from the herd on his first foray into the countryside, he is drawn by the strange familiarity of an enormous tree (the same tree beneath which the shepherd once rested), where he lays for the final time.
The tree, itself now imbued with the spirit, becomes an integral part of the village life as the centrepiece of the annual Spring Tree Festival (an event captured by documentarian Vittorio De Seta in his award-winning 1959 short, The Forgotten, which surely inspired this portion of Frammartino’s film.) Its symbolic function fulfilled, the tree is destined for the traditional furnaces that create the coal that warms the village, including the church. And with that, the journey is complete"¦
The young director captures the people of the mountain village and its surrounds with a lyricism that is both deeply romantic and observant of the long-established customs of the centuries-old settlement. (Frammartino’s parents were raised in just such a place.) Forest and cobblestone brick exist as one, as the camerawork of Andrea Locatelli suggests – at times, his lens soars above the fir trees of the woods, then juxtaposes it with the sparse, dark corners of the candlelit homes. The film’s sense of place is confidently defined, so too its abstraction of time.
Le quattro volte becomes somewhat mired in the villagers’ routine in its third act. The melancholy of the elderly man and the playfulness of the young goat give way to a more pedestrian section involving the fate of the tree trunk. But in a film that champions the the overall journey as a representation of a truly spiritual existence, these final scenes are crucial to Frammartino’s intent. His deceptively simple film is, in fact, brimming with universal wisdom and life-affirming sincerity.
