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The Metamorphosis of Birds (Catarina Vasconcelos, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-03-14 23:19:45 +0000 UTC
Although this film has certain specific points of reference -- I'll get to that in a minute -- there is something rather singular in the way it is assembled that makes The Metamorphosis of Birds a rather, um, odd duck. It is a deeply personal film, almost a cinematic family scrapbook designed for the director's father (the first character we see in the film) as an aide memoire as he enters assisted care. There is nothing remotely brash or controversial about Vasconcelos' film. If anything, it is achingly polite.
And yet, I feel as though it will prove highly divisive once more people start seeing it. Some viewers will, I predict, be so taken with its obvious beauty, its loving attention to light, landscape, and the poetry of small things, that they will feel an immediate formal kinship with Vasconcelos and her project. In some ways, Metamorphosis could be thought of as a combination of the emotive, almost bodily first-person perspective of Sophy Romvari's films with the hard rigor of Manoel de Oliveira.
But on the other hand, I think a lot of people are going to really dislike Metamorphosis. Some will simply find it precious and over-sharing, as if the director mistakes her own family history for a fount of universal truths. But more than this, I think other viewers (like myself) will simply find the film formally stultifying. This was an extremely long 80 minutes, and that's not because Metamorphosis is particularly slow.
No, the problem is that Vasconcelos has no sense of cinematic movement. It's not just that the camera almost never moves. Fixed-frame films can have a great deal of lyricism. I would contend that Oliveira's films are a good example. They seldom feel static because he orchestrated movement within the frame, and understood the importance of montage. If you are not going to move the camera, the edit is paramount. But Metamorphosis just plods along, following its director's family chronology, veering off occasionally onto different trains of thought.
The first part addresses her father's absence due to his work as a sailor, but there is no tangible sense of distance. There's just pictures of a house, and pictures of the sea. The middle section deals with the death of the director's mother, and compares her to foliage and trees. Her voiceover articulates this metaphor, and the images show plants, flowers, and trees. But there is no driving cinematic reason why we should accept this metaphor. It is just presented to us, from the director's mind, already dead on the slab. Vasconcelos is clearly a talented filmmaker, but I think this project -- and I hate myself for saying this -- was simply too close to her. She couldn't see what worked and what didn't.
But you may disagree.
