MICROCOSMOS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Miramax) Documentary by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou. MPAA Rating: G (insect sex) Running Time: 75 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Kristin Scott Thomas's narration occupies only about ninety seconds of the dazzling documentary MICROCOSMOS, which made it even easier to hear every comment in an audience composed largely of families with young children. Ordinarily, the prospect of an afternoon spent with a crowd of garrulous youngsters might send me screaming for an IV drip of Valium, but the 75 minutes I spent in MICROCOSMOS may have been the most uplifting 75 minutes I've spent in a theater in years. Here were 9- and 10-year-olds asking questions about insects, enraptured by the natural world, chattering excitedly in the lobby afterwards about their favorite scenes. It was one of those rare occasions when a film left me a bit more optimistic about our collective future as inquisitive beings.
MICROCOSMOS is the result of nearly twenty years invested by film-makers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou in creating the technology, researching their subject and actual filming which would provide a never-before-seen perspective into the insect world. Their marvelous miniature camera work allows them to present a documentary which is structured as a "day in the life" of the universe beneath your feet, from a butterfly "waking up" in its chrysalis to an evening alive with sound. In between, they confront the big subjects which face all God's creatures: birth, sex, work, death and natural disasters.
It is a simple enough concept (though the process was anything but simple), but what makes MICROCOSMOS so consistently enthralling is the ability of Nuridsany and Perennou to find stories in their tiny subjects, stories which give them a personality. The quest for food is presented with protective ants attacking a ladybug which has happened across their feeding ground; the quest for water finds caterpillars moving across parched ground like a fuzzy caravan, and ants gathered around a watering hole. Mating is not shown in clinical detail with a dry narrative description -- instead, two snails meet, caress and embrace in a strangely beautiful moment set to a soaring aria. In perhaps the film's most memorable sequence, a sacred scarab beetle rolls a small ball of dung until he is halted by a briar jutting out of the ground. Over the course of three minutes, that beetle becomes Sisyphus moving his stone, and its success sends up a round of applause.
The ability of that sequence to turn a beetle into a hero demonstrates that Nuridsany and Perennou have a talent most feature film-makers only dream about. Most of us have seen nature footage of birds or amphibians which made the insects the insects upon which they snacked insignificant bit players in the food chain. MICROCOSMOS is like a novel based on another novel's supporting characters, turning sub-plots into life stories. You find yourself vaguely sympathetic when a bird lands and begins feeding at an anthill, each peck reverberating like a massive footstep. One exceptional shot captures the bird's eye through the entrance to the ants' tunnels like an ogre peeping through a keyhole at his prey; another represents the bird as a monstrous shadow. The film-makers want to show you parts of our world you may have taken for granted, and to show you in a way which grabs you as a narrative as much as an entomology lesson.
In fact, the only time MICROCOSMOS sags is when it does resemble conventional nature footage. It is interesting watching a spider speed-wrap a grasshopper caught in its web, but it is a purely intellectual interest; the same is true of a spider which constructs a kind of underwater diving bell for itself. These are moments which might make you go "hmmm," but they don't fascinate you like a battle between stag beetles which seems to personalize the combatants. Yet one of the best moments in the stag beetle sequence is a seemingly throwaway scene of another, smaller insect being tossed to the ground during the titanic struggle like a nameless patron in a Western bar room brawl. It seems that even within this world there are supporting characters, and the wonderful thing about MICROCOSMOS is that you find yourself waiting for Nuridsany and Perennou to follow the unfortunate fellow on his own adventure, to the delight of children and adults alike.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 beetle manias: 9.
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