Quattro Volte -4 lives

Feeling withdrawl symptons from Italy last week I ordered this wonderful film from lovefilm on DVD.The title comes from Pythagoras,having four lives within us – the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human – "thus we must know ourselves four times".

The cycle of the four lives begin and end with images of charchol burning(once in a little stove top burner and later in a huge charchol furnace in the woods)and although it is a film that will make you feel very sad it also has moments of high comedy such as the incident when an ape van rolls back and crashes into the goat pen allowing the animals to rush out and create mayhem around the village - whose inhabitants are away re-enacting a Roman ceremony! The accident appears to have been triggered by Vuk the sheep dog - who won an award at Cannes for his part in the film.