Le quattro volte

Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful document. It opens a window on a time, place and people that are very different from modern city life. And yet the cycle man-animal-vegetable-mineral is still ours. While the movie depicts life as it is today in the Italian village (someone is taking a photo with a mobile phone) it could have taken place fifty years ago. The film depicts events at a slow pace, giving you time to absorb the events and landscape. Yet the film is engaging from start to finish. Scenes such as the one where the young goats are playing in the shed or when the dog challenges the boy are captivating, even sitting at the first row in a small art-house cinema.

I wanted to hate this film for one reason or the other. In the first 15 minutes or so I was angry at myself for watching it, but luckily I kept watching. Le quattro volte is simply about the cycle of life seen in close-mid shots and distant, long static shots of an idyllic provincial hamlet somewhere in the Italian mountains in the Calabria region. It is silent, mysterious and even awkward in moments but eventually the persistent poeticism and patience of the filmmaker taps into you, taps something eternal. It is exquisitely photographed by Andrea Locatelli and directed by Michelangelo Frammartino with such unyielding subtlety that even after the film has ended and the fugue wears off, you may be tempted to shrug it off as a nice little film that you will forget about in a days time, but the persistence of this film stays with you.

My score is more accurately a 7.8/10

"O Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced." This, the central sentiment expressed by the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in "The Great Silence" (2005), was also how I felt on leaving "Le Quattro Volte" (2010).

As with "The Great Silence," one of the most striking features of "Le Quattro Volte" (The Four Times) is its lack of dialogue. However, whereas for some individuals the 169 minutes of near silence in "The Great Silence" was overly taxing, in this shorter, more widely focused film - quietly reflecting aspects of life in an isolated village in Calabria – the Milanese director Michelangelo Frammartino has given us a predominantly visual poem of place, of space, of people and of the passing of time.

Although not overly religious, it is a spiritually orientated film in which we are asked to consider Pythagoras' contention that we must each know ourselves four times due to the fact that we "have four lives within us - the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human".

Therefore within its 88 minute run the small number of central human characters that are featured within it are soon relegated to positions of equality, or of equal vulnerability, before nature. Thus, for example, the goat-herder's animals soon come to the forefront of the film, as do other elements of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, in order to declare – seemingly – that these other realms also warrant serious and respectful consideration.

An extremely enjoyable and far-from-always-serious film, I found this a beautifully filmed, calming and thought-provoking movie.

I went to see this movie at Renoir-Curzon in central London last bank Monday.

I was with two friends of mine: another Calabrian and a Sicilian. I invited them telling the movie was shot in Calabria, but I was worried the plot wouldn't interest them.

I was wrong, this movie astonished the three of us completely: I was not only fascinated by the beautiful views of the Calabrian countryside, but the idea of mixing philosophic concepts with very basic, rural and remote communities still sticks in my mind.

"Le quattro volte" means "the four times" and the movie gives an interpretation of Pythagoras (who taught and settled in Calabria in the 6th century BC) concept of four successive lives that each of us holds: mineral, vegetable, animal and human.

In the movie there are all the elements of this concept shown in a very poetic and amusing way: we have an old goatherd as human, a kidskin as animal, a tree as vegetable and coal (carbon) as mineral. All connected in a cycle of life and death to symbolise the re-incarnation.

The sound of nature and rural human activities is the soundtrack of the movie, it makes us understand we, as human beings, are not at the centre of the universe, we should be aware of the elements we are part of and live in harmony with them.

All this makes Le Quattro volte an absolute masterpiece: 10/10

As charming and visually captivating as this film may be, it lacks content which at times seems to be filled with shots that are too long or that do not provide relevant elements to the film (besides offering the already mentioned captivating visuals) and that after a while become exhausting. The problem with this film is that it's too long for it's content but if it had been done as a short it would have probably lacked atmosphere.

This extensive use of long lasting shots and static moments at some point stop creating reflection moments and instead create reasons for the audience to grow bored which, to some extent, takes the effectiveness off the ending. Slow paced movies have to work in a particular way so that the audience may remain focused on the plot, to do this, things have to happen within the story presented; that rarely happens here.

So as other reviews mentioned, if the viewer has the desire to have a closer look at the rural Italian life, yeah, they'll find a sort of... well, slow view of what that is. If you're looking for an art-house kind of thing, this doesn't really work either. The real problem is that it doesn't either show enough rural life in terms of a documentary, nor is it deep enough to be a successful fiction film. Cute, but really wasn't able to engage the story.