Le Quattro Volte (2010)
Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino
Venture Films, 88 minutes, Not-rated
★★★
In symphonic music, a tone poem is a work that invokes writing, art, or something else non-musical. The film Le Quattro Volte has been described as a tone poem to one of Pythagoras’ lesser known theories. Describing the film is akin to asking how one would make a movie about music. I don’t mean a musician; I mean the music itself. Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino made such an attempt back in 2010. Le Quattro Volte garnered great praise from film buffs and intellectuals. Based on its worldwide box office of just $255,000, they were probably the sum total of its audience.
First things first. You don’t need to speak a single word of Italian, because no one else does either. It is not a silent film per se–we hear goat bells, barking dogs, the huff of an underpowered truck climbing steep Calabrian hills, wind, and background human voices–but there is no dialogue of any sort. So, what’s it about? That’s not so easy to describe either. It translates as “the four times,” and this is where Pythagoras comes into play.
Pythagoras (570-495 BCE) is remembered mostly for his mathematical theorems, especially the one relating to the area of right triangles. He was also a philosopher of what today we’d call an esoteric bent. He thought that he had lived multiple lives, but not in the way one associates with Hindu reincarnation. His view was related to what is sometimes called the transmigration of souls–though it has a fancy name, metempsychosis–but he did not think the soul’s fate could be altered by any force such as karma. His four “times,” or migrations, go from human to animal to plant to mineral. Okay, try putting that in a movie.
Maybe an easier way to comprehend Frammartino’s film is to view it as a circle of existence representation in four acts. This helps make sense of an unexplained opening scene in which men with shovels flatten steaming holes in what looks to be a miniature volcano. The true first act, though, involves an elderly shepherd. He is wracked by a persistent cough and is clearly dying, but he and his dog faithfully shuttle a large flock of goats between their tin-and-wood pen and tufted pasture lands each day. He also peddles snails to local villagers for their cooking pots, but mainly he’s so frail he can hardly be bothered to brush away the ants that crawl over his face as he rests beside a tree. At night, he treats his cough by drinking dust from the church floor mixed with water.
Act two, after the goatherd’s death and an eerie religious procession that looks like a colorized scene from a Bergman film, involves the birth of a goat kid, its weaning, and its separation from the flock. It rests beside a tree before night falls and the screen goes black. We next see a wintery landscape and a tall fir swaying in the breeze. At this juncture, the fate of the tree takes over. Call it act three. Act four moves us to the mineral realm.
Each act ends with blackness, and each is also a metaphor for other things. The tree, for example, stands for cultural remembrance. I will not pretend that this film is for everyone. There is no true narrative of any sort, it’s often open-ended perplexing, and the pace is deliberately slow. How else to represent the passage of time? The languid pacing, though, provides cinematographer Andrea Locatelli with a rich canvas upon which he paints the languorous rhythms of life in a poor Calabrian village. Although human souls toil largely without machines and sometimes work hard, no one seems rushed. Maybe no one is in a hurry to become a mineral!
At times Le Quattro Volte reminded me of Terence Malik’s The Tree of Life, but mostly it’s simply unlike anything else. Is it profound, or intellectual posturing? That’s really up to the viewer to decide but, to come full circle, it helps to imagine it as a tone poem, not a conventional film. Think of its silences as meditative and its sweeping pan shots as immersion within nature and its transformations. If you give it a try, be patient. You could even watch it in individual segments, walk away, and repeat. But I must emphasize that if you like movies with wall-to-wall action, steer well clear of this film.
Rob Weir
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