Les Proies (The Game) (Marina de Contes, 2018) (Patreon)

The English title of Les Proies, "The Game," is a bit misleading. I suppose de Contes did not want to call it "The Quarry" because of the multiple meanings of that word, and "The Prey" sounds far more dramatic than the film actually is. But "game" implies its own double-meaning which is not entirely applicable here. There is no game-playing in this film. It depicts a group of men who are deadly serious about their hobby, and fully cooperative in its execution. There is no competition in "The Game." 

Rather, there is a collective practice of wood-pigeon hunting, a sport which has a great deal of apparatus and ritual involved. But you may not know what you are watching until very late in Les Proies. In fact, you might not fully understand the documentary until the end. De Contes provides no explanatory frame for what we see. And what we see is, frankly, bizarre. Men have pigeons attached to thin metal platforms which are themselves attached to a complex cord-and-pulley system, hoisting the immobilized bird up into the top of a tree. Down in the exceedingly well-appointed dugout / bird blind, there is an even more complex set of pulleys that appears to control distant traps outside the underground headquarters. There is a lot of this vague activity. Only very late in the film does anyone actually pick up a gun.

In certain respects, Les Proies is the ideal True/False film. It completely abjures context in favor of close anthropological observation, and de Contes is not afraid of throwing her viewer into the deep end of basic confusion. The clearest elements of the film are only tangentially related to the pigeon hunt. Unidentified loggers (referred to by the hunters only as "they") are cutting down the trees where the group conducts its hunt. So even before we are sure what we are observing, we know that Progress is jeopardizing its future. Like the hunt itself, Les Proies requires patience. We accrue clues along the way as to what we are seeing, and by the end, the meaning snaps shut like a trap.