Gunda (2020, Victor Kossakovsky) (Patreon)

52/100

For all its emphatic artiness—b&w, no music or narration, shots sustained at length, etc.—this isn't all that far removed from a DisneyNature film, at least until its downer of an ending. Being more of a Microcosmos kinda guy (do people still watch that?), I OD'd on clumsy-piglet cuteness after just a few minutes, and generally resisted the film's efforts to tug at my heartstrings. Yes, it's painful to watch ten unbroken minutes of Gunda's unmistakable distress after her babies are carted away (particularly her repeated looks inside the sty, hoping she'll somehow find them there this time), but it would likewise be painful to watch much of what befalls animals in the wild; nobody would be happy about an hour of adorable zebra-foal shenanigans that turn out to be prolonged setup for your horror at seeing them killed and devoured by lions. Ultra-aggressive sound design bugged me, too, especially during the cow interlude when he cranks the flies' buzzing up to 11. On the other hand, I loved the entire sequence devoted to the roosters' "escape" from their carrier, which Kossakovsky* shoots with an eye toward genuine strangeness and non-manipulative anthropomorphism that did in fact remind me of Microcosmos. (It may help that I can never forget, looking at flightless or mostly flightless birds, that they are in fact dinosaurs, not "technically" but literally. A rooster moving with extreme caution through a forest landscape, one claw held aloft for long seconds before finishing the step, eyes darting constantly about in response to barely audible sounds, looks very different from your standard cock-a-doodle-doo.) I was enthralled even before the one-legged chicken hopped into frame. Just a digression, alas, but at least it'll help me fill out my Best Scene ballot. (FYC, fellow Skandies voters.) 

* When logging a film by an unfamiliar director, I always quickly search my master list, just to make sure that I haven't seen one of his/her previous films and forgotten about it. This might be the first time that I unexpectedly got a hit: While I skipped Aquarela (the other film that made a small splash in the U.S.), I did see Kossakovsky's Wednesday way the hell back at ND/NF 1998. Didn't write anything at the time and have zero memory of it now, though the IMDb logline vaguely rings a bell: "Viktor Kossakovsky was one of 101 children born in Leningrad on Wednesday 19 July 1961. Three decades later he tries to trace the people whose birthday he shared." And now it's been another two decades and change, jesus christ.