The Truffle Hunters (2020, Michael Dweck & Gregory Kershaw) (Patreon)

58/100

Bit of a disappointment, since Dweck's previous doc, The Last Race, landed on my 2018 top ten list. Briefly thought this would be just as formally striking—the opening shot, observing a hunter and two dogs from overhead as they move through the forest, often barely visible amongst the greenery, is a stunner—but most of what follows is conventional portraiture, albeit of the non-expository vérité variety that I much prefer. (Hilarious if familiar-from-YouTube exception: the pooch-mounted GoPro, which provides a Michael-Snow-eat-your-heart-out moment when the dog violently shakes off excess water.) Once again, I had virtually no pre-existing interest in the subject matter, and these compositions aren't nearly arresting enough to barge through such indifference as Last Race did. That leaves the truffle hunters themselves, who collectively failed to fascinate me as much as Dweck and Kershaw clearly hoped they would. (Might be a translation issue, I suppose, since much of what I enjoyed about the Long Island stock-car fans was their specific regional parlance. But there's also just a lot of old men talking to their dogs, which gets repetitive even when it's cute.) Also can't say I ever quite got a handle on the film's theme, as it alternately presents truffle hunting as a dying art to which practitioners are obsessively devoted (to the point of sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night) and a cutthroat business that's getting dogs poisoned to death and causing amateurs (in the original sense of that word) to renounce the thing they love most. And you know how every so often I praise a film—usually a Kelly Reichardt film—for ending at a seemingly inconclusive yet absolutely perfect moment, with me sitting there thinking "end now end now end now now now right now" and then rejoicing when it in fact does? The Truffle Hunters finds such an ending (in the restaurant, man alone eating eggs) and then keeps going for 10 more minutes.