MICROCOSMOS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Drama, comedy, sex, violence, and
jaw-dropping beauty, and all for free. You only
have to walk into your back yard, and the show is
every afternoon. The hitch is you need special
eyes to see it. Or you can see MICROCOSMOS. Two
French biologists have developed cameras that have
such eyes and have recorded a delightful 77 minutes
of nature. MICROCOSMOS is a film it would be
nearly impossible to dislike. It is educational,
entertaining, and often quite funny. Rating: high
+2 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 10 positive, 1 negative, 0 mixed
Few animal documentaries have ever done well as feature films. Perhaps the last successful feature film about insects was THE HELLSTROM CHRONICLE, made just over a quarter of a century ago. But by anybody's standards MICROCOSMOS is a remarkable documentary. What we have is a close-up look at a French meadow on a nice day. We are here in a secret garden to appreciate the afternoon of the fauna. In the course of the film we are going to spend a pleasant interlude just admiring the very small forms of life, mostly insects, and learning to appreciate their beauty and their noble traits. Occasionally we see something a big as a pheasant, and it does look grotesquely big and ungainly as it pecks up unsuspecting ants. But more often what we are watching are ladybugs, caterpillars, and the occasional snail. True these are mostly animals you found boring in biology class, but in MICROCOSMOS you will see them like you never saw them before. This is a G-rated film that is full of erotic sex and violence like your teacher would never have wanted you to see. Your high school would have never let you observe the chance afternoon encounter and love- making between two snails. This is the scene that had members of the audience panting. For violence there is a knock down drag out fight between two beetles that is genuinely exciting, even if you can't tell one beetle from the other. Spiders capture grasshoppers, spin webs and knit them up, then suck their blood. Then there is the sheer beauty and symmetry of a mosquito emerging from water, stretching its wings and then disappearing faster than the eye can see.
In the course of the film some of the creativity of insects is amazing. A water spider builds an underwater sanctuary by repeatedly going to the surface, catching air on her body, returning underneath the surface to contribute the air to a growing bubble. When the bubble is finally large enough, the spider pulls herself and her prey into the bubble to peacefully enjoy a well-earned under-water meal. Then there is the dogged persistence of a scarab beetle rolling a ball of dung up a hill, accidentally impaling it on a thorn, and then having to figure out why it will no longer move. Now admittedly, much of what we see might be able to see free on NOVA. But there they probably would insist on telling you what you were seeing. But the insects live perfectly happily without names or words and with the exception of a sentence or two at the beginning and end of the film the film is just music and a few humorous sound effects. There is no shortage of humor and surprisingly some insects are natural comedians. For example, wonder turns to humor as we are watching a long caravan of caterpillars walking nose to tail. As they walk they merge with another line of caterpillars like two traffic lanes merging for a tunnel. When the camera pulls back we realize that the line of caterpillars has merged with itself and in now walking around in a pointless loop. Or for the pure amazement of it we watch an ant trying to break through the surface tension of a drop of water to get a drink from the interior.
MICROCOSMOS is directed by two French biologists, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou. It took three years to shoot with special photographic equipment that took two years to develop and with a knowledge of wildlife that took fifteen years to accumulate. Nuridsany and Perennou have an incredible savvy for finding the parallels between animal and human behavior, or just a knowledge of what is beautiful in the animal world they take us to a prehistoric world with huge and odd vegetation and strangely-shaped creatures. They fumble, crawl, and tumble for 77 minutes.
MICROCOSMOS is entomological "Candid Camera." Besides a few overly corny sound effects, there is little to fault the film on. I rate it a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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