TIFF ’10 Review: ‘The Four Times’ A Playful & Spellbinding Parable

The following review is by A.A. Dowd for InReview Online who are assisting in our TIFF coverage this year.

It’s one of the incomparable pleasures of attending a major film festival: walking in blind to something you know virtually nothing about and being completely floored by it. In an age of media saturation, where even a no-budget oddity like “After Last Season” can get trailered on Apple.com, the ground zero of a fest screening is the closest one gets to filmgoing in a vacuum. I’m being a touch misleading: “The Four Times,” which I caught yesterday afternoon, isn’t exactly an out-of-nowhere transmission. It played the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, where it delighted and entranced enough folks to earn some screenings here in Toronto, as well as a few at Telluride and NYFF. Thing is, that’s all I knew about the film going in. Coming out of it, my brain curled around a number of nagging questions, not the least of which was: who the hell made this thing?

That’d be Michelangelo Frammartino, an Italian filmmaker whose only previous credit appears to be a Euro-festival fave called “The Gift.” He seems here to have emerged from the artistic womb fully formed; there is a grace, confidence and aesthetic prowess to this beguiling little picture that belies its “new director” pedigree. Blurring the line between pin-drop-quiet character study and observational documentary, Frammartino hones in on a quiet village in southern Italy, where a lonely old shepherd inches closer and closer to the grave. Where the film goes from there I won’t say, except to note that it bears a superficial resemblance, in pure premise at least, to another TIFF entry playing later in the week.

Once you figure out what “The Four Times” is up to––and I did in a single shot, the first point of fissure, the transition between the first and second “time”––you realize how simple its narrative/structural gimmick is. And how radical: the film’s break into two isn’t just a jarring POV shift, it’s a disruption of the secular “realism” that the movie has heretofore clung to. (Any suspicion that this might just be an unassuming docu-sketch of a dying old man goes straight out the window with the introduction of the second and––especially––the third “protagonists.”) And though Frammartino is exploring a very specific tenet of a very specific faith system, he intersects the film’s arc-as-spiritual-journey with small, clever allusions to eastern and western theology––a passion play on the march, cover taken under a giant tree for many seasons, etc. Such mixing and matching of religious signifiers speaks to a rather endearing faith in the shared links between our creation myths.

In the age of Carlos Reygadas and the Dardennes––who make punishing “spiritual” allegories aimed at atheist film critics, the Reverse Shot once quipped––Frammartino’s non-denominational parable hits you like a warm breeze. This may be the most playful religious picture since Rossellini’s “The Flowers of St. Francis.” And the audience ate it up, spellbound by its quiet stretches and totally tickled by its inspired comic intrusions. (There’s a long take involving a dog, a truck and the aforementioned marching passion play that ranks among the funniest and most ingenious single moments I’ve seen in years.) That a mixed crowd at a public screening sat utterly enraptured through this strange and completely wordless picture is a testament to its otherworldly power. Now why hasn’t it been picked up yet?