When I was a child, I stayed every other weekend at my grandparents' home.
I was spoiled rotten and absolutely adored my time there except for one thing: my grandad's awful hacking cough.
Every morning he used to bring up phlegm and spit it into the bucket which was beneath the bed. Hearing him made me want to retch.
I say this because I had long forgotten that grim sound until watching Le Quattro Volte.
In it, a goat herder tries to cure his unmovable cough by mixing water with dust brushed up from the floor of a church, presumably believing in a miracle. It was a good job my grandad was an atheist and didn't go for this treatment - it might have taken 15 years off his life!
Let's be honest...Le Quattro Volte is slow and it is not worth some of the rave reviews it has received.
But it is not without interest and prompts a couple of muted laughs.
It starts as it means to go on...there is a hillside scene, bells ring, a dog barks and goats appear over the horizon. In fact, quite a few goats.
The wizened herder sits next to a tree and coughs a bit and then he coughs a lot.
The next thing we see him in longjohns, drinking water and some brown powder which, it transpires, is the church floor dust.
No words are spoken. There is no commentary or music. Just the sounds of an Italian village which has stood since medieval times.
Then there is footage of goats and more goats.
Despite its limited scope the film does develop certain themes in a most unusual way: death is cheek by jowl with life.
And I didn't believe I'd get all unnecessary over a lost baby goat. But I guess the skill of the direction made me feel that way..
Michelangelo Frammartino may be skillful but he overdoes the set pieces, the camera dawdling far too long over certain scenes. The relevance, for example, of an ant on a tree trunk was lost on me.
But his technique of filming much of the movie from a distance gives context to the old-fashioned activities of the villagers.
So, Le Quattro Volte wasn't the waste of time I'd feared but I can't say it's the classic some are proclaiming.
I reckon it's worth 5.5/10
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