The wolf, a burning question of society... Between electoral calculations aimed at brushing in the hair a rather fierce mass of agricultural voters, a political interest in the absolutely absent scientific question and real problems on the ground for a trade already at risk, the canid can attract lightning. A fang catalyst whose cinema takes hold, since after the splendid Living with wolves (and the rest of his trilogy dedicated to the predator) by Jean-Michel Bertrand, two radically different new documentaries are proposed to Real Visions.
Tamina – Will There Ever Be What Used to Be?
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Tamina Valley is lost at the bottom of the Grisons in Switzerland. The ideal place for the quest that has begun Beat Oswald, co-director of the documentary: finally meet a wolf. But if everything here tends to be wild idyllus, a kind of mirage induced by the mountainous nature of the valley, the great predator raises no less problems than elsewhere...
A city film (Oswald doesn't hide it), reproducing the idea of the films of Jean-Michel Bertrand (tracking, the desire to fall on the predator) but perverting its process from within. Built of second-degree and a good dose of cynicism, the hunt itself is only a lure and the desire of the filmmaker lies nowhere else but in the desire to study a mountain community by the prism of the return of the savage.
Sometimes quasi-philosophical, the documentary allows for exciting reflections (he cites notably the brilliant Baptiste Morizot in his references, hardly surprising seen the subject) but all simmered in a constant overflow of laughs. Never serious, always out of step, mixing (unhappily) the tones, one emerges from Tamina with some beautiful images in mind, but being irremediably scrambled in a more absconic than enlightening talk. Too bad...
A Pastor
Second film, second atmosphere, diametrically opposed to that of Tamina. Exist the philosophical reflections of a city dweller lost to the mountain, A Pastor of the Louis Hanquet is a first film to draw the portrait of a shepherd. Job in peril little helped by the natural return of the wolf, Hanquet's camera will stick to the Basques of the taiseux Félix and his father, clinging to the ridges to shepherd their sheep.
Formally splendid, A Pastor manages perfectly to transcribe the atmosphere of the mountain, the work with the animals, the variety of gestures surrounding the shepherd's profession. More surprising, appear several times during the feature film of the thermal camera images (turned by the Swiss ethologist) Jean-Marc Landry in a scientific setting, then a posteriori integrated into the film) representing the great predator. A threatening music, a shocking formal burst of freedom taken with the documentary medium (especially the staging of a dream), these sequences find their meaning in the logic of the feature film but still disturb by the little nuance they bring.
Even more a pity, Louis Hanquet will reveal in Q&A session that this duo of shepherds was not fiercely opposed to the wolf, which they readily described as "the shepherd of shepherds". A nuance that would have been salvifying for a film smoothing out a highly complex statement to magnify the shepherd's profession and the other perfectly demonize the wolf... An important flat (especially as the director had all the material to make appear this nuance), which does not remove the maestria that Louis Hanquet took to film the mountain and its main protagonists. A splendid documentary, allowing even beautiful moments of emotion, not to be missed despite its few weaknesses!
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