Thursday, July 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Wild blue yawner

Winged Migration is visually stunning but intellectually barren

By Robert Chancey

Jacques Perrin aims to vault into heaven and is willing to exploit birds as camouflage while he sneaks in the celestial back door. A Luddite who employs advanced cinematic technology to denounce the modern world and a misanthrope convinced of his own saintly humanity, Perrin is a fabulously gifted director of visual wonders and a staggeringly banal thinker of obvious concepts.

His latest documentary, Winged Migration, has earned glowing reviews and a best feature documentary Oscar nomination, but it's a visual tour-de-force denuded by its tinny narration and simplistic ideas. According to Perrin and his collaborators (co-directors Jacques Cluzaud and Michel Debats and co-screenwriters Stéphane Durand, Francis Roux and Perrin's wife, Valentine) nature is beautiful and man is beastly. The immaculate images startle the eyes and the sophomoric notions numb the brain. Imagine a nature documentary made by Orson Welles on a day when he was reading the eco-terrorists' bible The Monkey Wrench Gang and struck by lightning; Winged Migration is that captivating and that aggravating.

Shot over three years on seven continents, the film is an intoxicating glimpse at the migratory patterns of various bird species. Boasting that "no special effects were used" in depicting the birds' flight patterns and their inimitable behavior on land, the filmmakers have managed to capture the seemingly true dynamics of nature in an unnatural way. Viewers will believe they are seeing and experiencing the world just like these inscrutable creatures. The planet becomes an enormous canvas re-imagined by these roving cameramen and their feathery companions.

From this new perspective, the vast landscapes of the world become poignant landmarks and the marvelous complexities of our gigantic home reveal themselves in moving pictures. The earth looks more compact and infinitely larger than we can casually imagine; one is struck by the sheer magnitude of this world and the grandeur and splendor of its many unique ecosystems.

And despite Alfred Hitchcock's best efforts 40 years ago to infect filmgoers with ornithophobia, the birds display a thrilling, swaggering haughtiness. Their languid ease in flight, their peculiar mannerisms on the ground and their vibrant, sometimes unclassifiable colors make them naturals on camera. These feathered rogues strut and preen like imperturbable cinematic deities in an age of thespian mediocrity.

Unfortunately, the majesty and diverting charm of these remarkable birds is wholly squandered by Perrin's narration. His soporific tone and empty epiphanies about the seasons changing and the inevitable cycles of birth and death mock the regal and unpretentious airs of these thrilling creatures. Even more galling, Perrin attempts to magnify his theme of avian purity and human degradation by capturing images of birds being harmed and killed.

In an unidentified Eastern European industrial wasteland, Perrin's camera patiently follows a bird as it ambles into a pond of toxic sludge. And in North America, he watches a small flock of ducks take flight and then, just as quickly, be shot out of the sky by well-equipped hunters. This is the moral equivalent of denouncing rape by portraying it as sadistically as possible--it allows the filmmaker to viscerally manipulate his audience and feel morally superior to the action depicted on the screen.

Perrin may have duped the Academy with his pseudo-intellectual peek at idiosyncratic species like the Greater Sage Grouse and the Red Crowned Crane. But paying customers will understand that he is merely a pesky voyeur--a spy in the house of doves.