Reviews
Le Quattro Volte
Adam Weymouth
Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino
Certificate U, 88 mins
Frammartino has attempted a bold and humble thing in Le
Quattro Volte. Of the four lead roles, only one of them is
human. Set in and around a hillside village in Calabria, southern
Italy, the film begins by following an ailing goatherd as he tends
to his flock, racked by a painful cough for which he takes once
daily a folkloric medicine made from dust swept up in the village
church.
One evening he finds he has lost his medicine, and unable to
rouse anyone in the church, he passes away in the night. The film
then shifts to follow the short life of an infant goat, before
changing once again to fir tree which is felled, erected in the
town square for the springtime celebrations and then turned into
charcoal, and ultimately traces the journey of the charcoal itself,
before it is ignited into fire.
A film that draws no distinction between its human and non-human
characters is a refreshing and a disconcerting thing. There is some
dialogue, but it is distant and half heard, and no different from
the bleatings and the bells of the goats, or the wind that stirs
the pine, or the metallic tinkling of the charcoal as it is
shovelled into bags. The flock makes its way across a hillside, and
later, filmed from the same position, a crowd of people does the
same, equally indistinct at distance. Yet there is no slide into
anthropomorphism. Instead we are made to turn our gaze upon
ourselves, and question just what, if anything, makes people unique
in the world.
Much of the film is shot from fixed camera positions, sometimes
several metres above the ground, or half hidden behind a rock, or
peering through the trees. On occasion we are left in total
darkness, inside a tomb or amongst the stacks of logs as they
smoulder into charcoal, listening to the far off rumblings outside.
We wonder whose eyes we are seeing through, and often it seems to
be the very earth itself, watching its own processes unfold. It is
this, more than any individual character, that we come to identify
with. Several times we see an ant, once crawling across the
shepherd’s face, then across the goat’s face, then across the
fissured and craggy bark of the fir tree. Others beings, it
suggests, and the earth itself, make no distinction between the
surfaces of this world, give no dominance to one life form or
another. So why should we?
Ultimately it is a story of cycles, of seasons, of rituals, of
birth and death. When the goatherd dies at Easter, and the next
shot shows a goat in the first seconds of its life, the film seems
to be developing a theme of resurrection. Yet when we then see that
same goat perish beneath a tree, that tree felled and turned into
charcoal, that charcoal reborn as fire, it begins to seem that
there is also a wider vision of the interconnectedness of things.
There are suggestions that people may be changing these
patterns, but they are altered by the non-human world too. Perhaps
the modernisation of the farm will pass away as surely as the
season. Or perhaps it is different. We are given no answers. But we
are provided a different perspective from which to consider.
It is funny, wise, and beautifully shot. It allows humans to
retain their dignity, whilst also putting them squarely in their
place. It is a remarkable, and an important, achievement.