The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)

In only his second feature, Frammartino has found a fresh and ravishingly poetic and beautiful way to explore the relationship between the spirit, man and nature.

Frammartino keeps the material engaging simply by aiming the camera at his subjects and letting the material organically emerge-rather than enforcing the supernatural element with overstatement.

Here is a film that invites philosophical musing. Made without dialogue and often in long shots, it regards the four stages of existence in a remote Italian village.

It is easy to describe what occurs in Le Quattro Volte; less easy, however, to explain it. Calculatedly meditative yet casually metaphysical, Le Quattro Volte (The Four Times in English) is austere, funny, beautiful, and transfixing.

Le Quattro Volte may sound like art-house tedium, but in fact it's a movie of grave beauty, serene pace and surprising humor.

Alternately beguiling and actively irritating, Frammartino's second feature is too uneven to recommend whole-heartedly, but contains so many individually fascinating movies that attention should be paid.

The director races far too quickly to get to his ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust punch line. This is the film of a pretender, not a believer.

Beautiful landscapes. That's it. Nothing serves to make you feel the pointlessness of existence more than sitting through an hour and a half where only four things happen, none of them surprising or compelling. It would have been an engaging 10-minute short film, perhaps. The metaphysical theme, the gentle passing through the cycle of life, told in the four iterations in the film, is pretty much adolescent philosophy. I like the fact that it is simply witnessed, rather than narrated or explained, but the quality and insight of this aspect has been overplayed by critics. It would be so much more rewarding just to go and sit on a hillside than to sit watching this film.