Beautiful, until we get there
Nature doc shows man’s influence on perfect forests
‘ Seasons” is a gorgeous movie that is exceedingly strange, not necessarily in the story it tells but in the way it tells it.
Talk about using a velvet hammer.
Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, who have explored the air and the sea in “Winged Migration” and “Oceans,” now look at the land — and pointedly how man has made his mark on it. ( Potential spoiler alert: The mark is not a positive one.) They show the beauty of the natural world with stunning cinematography, the behavior of animals in their natural habitat with incredible photography. It’s jaw- dropping stuff.
Then every now and then they hit you over the head with guilt over the ugly imprint we’ve made.
Then it’s back to the incredible animals. On the whole punishment- reward scale, the audience comes out on top.
The film traces 15,000 years, over which time the glorious forests of Europe are thinned and eventually disappear in places; at the end of the movie we see Paris and learn that “10,000 years ago, this was an expanse of forest, inhabited by wild animals. If we are capable of building eternal cities, we should be able to preserve the nature in our world.”
That’s the movie in a nutshell — going from beautiful animals romping and fighting and mating and dying in the forests to concrete slabs and pollution- belching factories.
It’s not all a political screed, and in fact, there’s little narration at all. Perrin and Cluzaud let their camera do the talking, which is wise — it speaks volumes.
We follow sets of animals throughout. If the baby foxes and wolves don’t make you oooh and ahhh, nothing will. But we also get the occasional reminder that the law of the jungle applies to the forest, too. Wolves aren’t herbivores, after all, a fact a deer slowed by heavy snow learns the hard way.
Humans are shown mostly in the background, unobtrusive at first. This, too, will change. By the time we’re done we will have saddled up horses for war, dragged them into labor as plow animals, thinned out trees to hunt wildlife and eventually cleared out entire forests to build cities and factories.
“Man has become a geological force,” the narrator says. “He modifies nature and the seasons.” And how. It’s an odd back and forth, though again, the beauty of the images ultimately overwhelms the message of the words. “What consideration do we have for our fellow creatures of the planet?” we are asked at the end. The answer is clear: Not much.