‘Seasons’ captures how animals use nature and man abuses it

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Bears interact in the snowy, unspoiled forest in “Seasons.” | Music Box Films

“Seasons” is a gorgeous movie that is exceedingly strange, not necessarily in the story it tells but in the way it tells it.

Talk about using a velvet hammer.

Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, who have explored the air and the sea in “Winged Migration” and “Oceans,” now look at the land — and pointedly how man has made his mark on it. (Potential spoiler alert: The mark is not a positive one.) They show the beauty of the natural world with stunning cinematography, the behavior of animals in their natural habitat with incredible photography. It’s jaw-dropping stuff.

Then every now and then they hit you over the head with guilt over the ugly imprint we’ve made.

Then it’s back to the incredible animals. On the whole punishment-reward scale, the audience comes out on top.

The film traces 15,000 years, over which time the glorious forests of Europe are thinned and eventually disappear in places; at the end of the movie we see Paris and learn that “10,000 years ago, this was an expanse of forest, inhabited by wild animals. If we are capable of building eternal cities, we should be able to preserve the nature in our world.”

That’s the movie in a nutshell – going from beautiful animals romping and fighting and mating and dying in the forests to concrete slabs and pollution-belching factories.

In other words, this will probably not play in heavy rotation in the Secretary of the Interior’s office in a Trump administration.

It’s not all a political screed, and in fact, there’s little narration at all. Perrin and Cluzaud let their camera do the talking, which is a wise decision – it speaks volumes.

Careful readers will note that the movie covers a time span greater, by an order of magnitude, than the history of moving pictures. Or stationary ones, for that matter. The filmmakers shot footage in still-unspoiled forests in France, Norway, Scotland, Romania and Holland for the early portions, settling us in to an idyllic scene as the animals live their lives, the threat of man nowhere to be found — at least not yet.

We follow sets of animals throughout. If the baby foxes and wolves don’t make you oooh and ahhh, nothing will. But we also get the occasional reminder that the law of the jungle applies to the forest, too. Wolves aren’t herbivores, after all, a fact an adorable deer slowed by heavy snow learns the hard way.

But the inevitable march of what we think of as progress can’t be put off forever (the fauna of the forest might have a different way of describing it). Humans are shown mostly in the background, unobtrusive at first. This, too, will change. By the time we’re done we will have saddled up horses for war, dragged them into labor as plow animals, thinned out trees to hunt wildlife and eventually cleared out entire forests to build cities and factories.

“Man has become a geological force,” the narrator says. “He modifies nature and the seasons.”

And how.

It’s an odd back and forth, though again, the beauty of the images ultimately overwhelms the message of the words. “What consideration do we have for our fellow creatures of the planet?” we are asked at the end. The answer is clear: Not much.

Bill Goodykoontz, USA TODAY Network

★★★

Music Box Films presents a documentary directed by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud. Rated PG (for thematic elements and related images). In French with English subtitles. Running time: 95 minutes. Opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre.

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