Movies into Film
In-flight entertainment (Photo: Sony Pictures Classics)
Winged Migration
Directed by Jacques Perrin
France, 2002
No devotee of snow and ice can afford to miss Winged Migration. The film features not one but two avalanches, the second of which—in the Arctic—is a magnificent feast for the senses. After the torrent, when calm returns, the camera spies a small flock of birds, wings in repose, catching a ride downstream on a sliver of broken ice, an impromptu glacial barge that carries them a notch further on their journey.
In tracing migratory patterns from south to north and back again, director Jacques Perrin and crew craft an artwork rich in water imagery; it’s an orgy of rolling ocean waves and coursing rivers. Sometimes the images glide by so fast, we don’t have a chance to savor them fully. Why couldn’t the camera dwell a few seconds longer on a gaggle of geese occupying a gray, lonely beach? The spectacular sights deserve music choices more consistently apposite. Who thought Nick Cave benefited this material?
(Photos: Sony Pictures Classics)
OUT OF BREATH
Respiro
Directed by Emanuele Crialese
Italy, 2003
Pedophiles might want to take a gander at Respiro. Shot under the blazing sun of a Mediterranean isle, the film concerns itself with rival gangs of bronzed brown ragazzi who take turns stripping off one another’s underwear. And there isn’t an ugly child in the bunch—heavens, no! One photogenic little Adonis after the next scurries over jagged rocks and baked earth, their tender young backsides on prominent display.
What’s up with this? The press would have us believe that Respiro portrays a woman who longs for freedom outside her stifling domestic commitments. Yet the mother acted out by Valeria Golino isn’t a character; she’s a generic free spirit, a compendium of every movie cliché about lusty, earthy Italian women. She gestures frenetically, so that we’ll know how she fights to be “free,” and in one scene she comes casually close to incest with her son. She evinces, certainly, more affection for the boy, who looks barely 13, than for her gruff fisherman husband.
The director sometimes whips up nice touches. When there are underwater sequences, the soundtrack swells with the watery, spaced-out purity of the British baritone saxophonist John Surman. In the culminating frames, most of the cast plunges into the sea for an ensemble dunk, and the camera rests a while on lower limbs thrashing about; it’s as if the villagers had morphed into mermaids and were waving goodbye with their tails. – NPT
June 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com