IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
WINGED MIGRATION
Directed by Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats
Rated G, 89 minutes
Once you've torn hell-for-leather down a spit of land and hurled yourself into the sky with a flock of Greylag Geese, once you've flown wing to wing and head to head with the Eurasian Crane, once you've shared the air with storm-tossed pelicans watching lightning sizzle the clouds below, you'll never feel quite the same when you look up on an autumn afternoon and see a fluid, chisel-sharp V of birds heading south for the winter. And if you're a hunter, you may feel the sudden urge to trade in that shotgun for a telephoto lens when you see birds you've traveled with over thousands of miles suddenly drop from the sky like stones.
You've seen footage of birds before, but you've never seen anything like this. Jacques Perrin, the French actor ("Cinema Paradiso") and producer ("Himalaya") who back in 1969 won the Foreign Film Oscar for "Z", assembled a crew of over 450 people and a cast of hundreds of thousands of birds to put together this stunning film that was four years in the making.
Some of the birds were literally born to be movie stars. They were incubated to the sounds of airplane motors and movie cameras, and greeted upon hatching by some of the cameramen and crew members who would later take to the skies with them in lighter-than-air craft and travel with them like doting parents. The result is footage from within the airborne formations of migrating birds, a perspective that taps into our dreams of flight and radiates an extraordinary sense of privilege, acceptance, and belonging.
Migration is a fight for survival, and there is a powerful sense of purpose to these birds in flight, necks stretched forward and eyes narrowed against stinging blasts of wind, rain, and snow, wings beating to propel them sometimes over thousands of miles of ocean, with no place to land. When a flock of geese happens upon an aircraft carrier, for most of them it is a chance to tuck heads under downy wings and catch a draught of restorative sleep. One macho bird disdains this softness, and struts along the deck like an admiral inspecting to make sure everything is ship-shape.
Perrin's five production teams shot film at a profligate ratio of 225-1. Refining those three hundred and forty hours of footage down to an hour and a half of finished product produced some amazing scenes. An army of crabs on a beach surround a bird with a broken wing, and fall on it like the children in "Suddenly Last Summer" swarming over the hapless Sebastian. A captive parrot on a boat on the Amazon coolly breaks jail by picking the lock of his cage. In Monument Valley, a flock of Canadian Geese take a break from flying to strut through John Ford's familiar stomping grounds like a gang of Old West outlaws. Geese in a pen look up with poignant wonder as a flock of their wild cousins wings majestically overhead. Birds soar above the Seine, wheel over the Great Wall of China, struggle grimly through the Mordor-like soot and smoke of factories in Eastern Europe. Hunters on Long Island pick them off with the startling intrusion of gunfire; moments later the survivors wing their way past the haunting twin monoliths of the World Trade Center. It's a sobering reminder: man kills man, man kills birds, crabs kill birds, all in a grim roundelay of death. However, when birds dive to the water's surface to pick off an unlucky fish and guzzle it down, we never turn a hair.
At the end of the spring migration, the community breaks up into family time. There's courtship and mating, the patter of little claws, hunting and gathering, feeding, social life. Penguins crowd busily across the sands like bathers on an August Sunday at Coney Island. Red-crowned Cranes do a dance that would excite envy in the discos of Miami's South Beach. Then, a hint of a distant nip cools the air, and it's time to pack up, close the summer quarters, and begin to think about starting the long trip back.
There's not much talk. What there is comes from Perrin in a heavily-accented voice-over, and it's not always necessary, but it's blessedly brief. More information ("The White Stork travels 3,100 miles from Central Africa to Western Europe") comes in the form of superimposed titles. There's a musical score with a droning New-Age flavor by Bruno Coulais, a prolific fellow whose resumé shows a cool 66 movies over the past decade. Whether it does anything for this movie will depend on your taste; to my thinking, something in the jazz idiom would have served the picture better.
But most of what you hear is just the calls of the birds. And what you see is one fantastic image after another of birds nesting, birds in flight, birds on shipboard or birds dancing or birds crossing the road to get to the other side. It all builds an indelible story of survival, and it does so with a beauty and an intimacy that will make you shake your head with wonder as you fly away home.
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