The quiet conflict of 'Le Quattro Volte'

The Italian import "Le Quattro Volte" is not a puzzle, per se, despite the nod toward spiritual mysteries one might find within it. But its various visual pieces interlock as if cut on a jigsaw, making up a picture of quiet conflict.

Amid the several small-town vignettes that the painterly director Michelangelo Frammartino mines out of the mountainous village he portrays in southern Italy exists a kind of war, between man-made geometry and natural disorder -- between the human impulse to make things systemic and nature's urge toward chaos.

Frammartino focuses on an old goatherd (Giuseppe Fuda), whose routine includes a daily dosage of dust. In exchange for a pail of goat's milk, he receives a small pile of sweepings from the church's caretaker, as if it were contraband. The old man stirs this into water, drinks it, and the mixture is clearly what keeps him alive: The day after he finds the church doors locked, his health deteriorates.

The old man's failed effort to find a surefire formula for life, something to rely on in an indifferent universe, is reflected everywhere in the town. Although this may make "Le Quattro Volte" sound like a religious tract, it is anything but. In each effort to wrangle reality into order, the inhabitants come up against a wall of cosmic caprice. The extraordinary thing about Frammartino is how he captures the sense of quiet wildness within the framework of a film.