Heart of an Oak
Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux’s wordless wildlife documentary is sometimes stunning to look at but is saddled with a fatal sense of artifice.
Image courtesy of Icon Film Distribution
This French documentary, a film made over at least a year and centred on an oak tree and the natural life to be found around it, contains some brilliant wide-screen photography by Mathieu Giombini. But by now everyone is surely aware of just how breathtaking such images can be as evidenced by television documentaries that feature Sir David Attenborough and are justly admired around the world. However, even if Heart of an Oak is in some ways akin to them, it is also very different. Whereas Attenborough is a great guide to what we see, this film by Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux with its wondrous close-ups of the natural world opts to exclude any kind of commentary. Thus, it is that we learn only in the end credits that the tree dates from 1810 but even then we are not told that its location is in Sologne in Central France. It is also only during these final moments that some of the species seen in the film are identified for us. Many of the animals, birds and insects shown are familiar but not everyone will readily identify a coypu or a Eurasian jay.
The lack of immediate information would be a minor point if the film worked well but, unless great nature shots strike you as so awesome that context does not matter, you may share at least some of my critical responses. Even the fact that the filmmakers have apparently described their film as "an adventure movie" prompted doubts on my part. It's a phrase that recalls the Disney slogan for his documentaries of the 1950s which were termed “True-Life Adventures". By the standards of the day, they too were well photographed, but criticisms were made both of their commentaries (the standard well below what Attenborough would later achieve) and of the way in which their scores gave certain animal behaviour a comic turn through the use of accompanying music that sounded jocular. That last feature came to mind here when Charbonnier and Seydoux suddenly opted to feature a scene of acorn weevils copulating to the sound of Dean Martin's record of ‘Sway’ heard at some length.
That sequence is enough in itself to make one ponder the approach being adopted here and other musical additions to the perfectly adequate score by Cyrille Aufort are also questionable. In the middle of the film images are set to a recording of Leslie Garrett singing a Handel aria. This time it is not altogether ill-suited to what we are seeing, but the tone that results suggests a pointedly poetic work and Heart of an Oak is not exactly that even if it does end with a French song of an autumnal nature the lyrics of which are not rendered in sub-titles. But before the film’s final stage is reached there is another piece of music. This may be a recording by Keith Lockhart, but for many viewers it brings back memories of Glenn Miller since the music in question is his instrumental hit ‘In the Mood’. It is used for a lively sequence of young creatures asserting themselves yet the music’s association with Miller makes it a bizarre choice.
I have mentioned these musical numbers because they indicate the oddity of the outlook behind this film, but my major objection to it lies in the way in which extensive intercutting creates the feeling of a work that has been dramatised. There is little sense here of natural observation. Instead, what we get is the impression of sequences being built up in a decidedly contrived way. Admittedly much of what we see may have happened unorganised and captured by various cameras present but early on a red squirrel is seen in a series of shots with frequent cutting away to birds or other animals that are supposedly aware of it. Editing of this kind suggests that different bits of film have been cobbled together. A scene with a goshawk pursuing prey is tremendous, but the cameras are so ideally placed to capture every detail that it is hard to believe that it is wholly authentic. Similarly, an episode with a snake slithering over the tree’s branches is so built up with agitated reactions to its presence that one starts to question how real it all is (that pesky squirrel puts in yet another appearance here).
The seasons may change during the filming but this is hardly reflected in a way that might have given the film a better sense of shape. The photography includes several stunning sequences below ground but their nature is such that one wonders by what means these shots were achieved and in addition there are examples of time lapse photography suddenly brought in. What it all amounts to is that in my case (others may feel quite differently and I understand that the film has been a huge hit in France) the film never throws off a fatal sense of artifice. The filmmakers may have decided that the unusual subject matter needed to be boosted by such a treatment. However, despite it having in contrast a significant commentary as a key component, Heart of an Oak did remind me of a little-known but impressive and rewarding British film by Christopher Morris. That was 2023’s A Year in a Field which was centred not on a tree but on an ancient stone monolith in Cornwall but which studied the inner life of the field and the creatures that contributed to it. It may not have been an out-and-out masterpiece but its character was the polar opposite of this film and it worked in a way that for this viewer never happened here.
Original title: Le chêne.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Dir Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux, Pro Barthélémy Fougea and Michel Seydoux, Screenplay Michel Kessler, Michel Seydoux and Laurent Charbonnier, Ph Mathieu Giombini, Ed Sylvie Lager, Music Cyrille Aufort.
Caméra One/Winds/La Fondation Didier/Gaumont-Icon Film Distribution.
80 mins. France. 2022. UK Rel: 12 July 2024. Cert. U.
