Le Quattro Volte

AN ELDERLY shepherd struggles with a nagging cough high in the hills of Calabria.

The poor old fellow can barely muster the energy to swipe away the flies on his face as he makes his way back to the steep, craggy village where he lives. He visits with the lady churchwarden to obtain some holy ashes, a "cure" for his affliction.

It's hardly the most progressive or effective medicine, but life in the mountains has changed little over the centuries. The local priest still wears a frockcoat, peasant food consists of roadside snails, and charcoal is manufactured using a large, burning pyre. Indeed, when men dressed in Roman centurion garb turn up to re-enact the Passion, we're momentarily unsure if they're actors or local law enforcement.

For almost an hour, director Michelangelo Frammartino's acclaimed documentarismomight easily be mistaken for a Robert Flaherty ethnograph. Elegiac representations of snail-gathering, superstitious remedies and ancient agricultural practises form a pretty postcard from a forgotten world.

But Le Quattro Volte(literally, The Four Times) is no mere chronicle of a rural precipice. Wordless and paced so that the ill-fated dinner snails look like Speedy Gonzalez, the film's somnambulist real-time rhythms and details mask richer, deeper themes.

Slowly but surely, the picture abandons narrative progression to embrace the four times of its title. The shepherd's story gives way to a vignette concerning a lost baby goat; the bleating animal is forgotten in favour of an Easter pageant; the passion play is dropped for charcoal processing. Each change of direction is simultaneously logical yet surprising. This is a film about everything and nothing.

Hailing from the same meditative school of art-doc as Gideon Koppel's Sleep Furiouslyand Nicolas Philibert's To Be and to Have, Le Quattro Volte finds its calling in outlining the mutability of a seemingly immutable landscape. Patient viewers will be rewarded with a complex depiction of living and dying. Hurried punters may not last 10 minutes.