The emperor's walk to fame. (1/2)

Is it a documentary film or fiction ? Comedy drama, drama, « documentary-soap », romantic comedy, melodrama, edutainment ?

Movie identity papers and awards -including an Oscar- answer : documentary film. Why ? Because it is a live action movie without actors ? But, the actors are there, though not on screen : they are supposed to narrate the film, their voice over actually creates it.

Turn the sound off, « La marche de l’empereur » is a documentary film ; turn it on, your ears tell you you are watching fiction.

The film pictures are more stunningly beautiful than meaningful ; left to their own wits, they are unable to tell a story. However compelling, they remain mostly static and repetitive, symbolic rather than narrative, as when a maverick penguin is shot, dwarfed in the desolate white landscape.

They would make -and certainly did- for a beautiful pictorial book, but even editing adds them little narrative value : in the following shot, the maverick penguin is nowhere in sight, it has disappeared, drowned and digested by the ice field ; its fate is clear, but its story remains untold.
If the film were silent, each viewer would be inspired to invent his own stories or content himself with the pleasure of just watching.

« La marche de l’empereur » does not take the risk of such individual freedom. Voice over, music and lyrics join their forces and persuasion -if not coercion- power to tell us what to see on screen : penguin boy meets penguin girl, they have penguin kid.

The film is an outstanding, state of the art technical achievement that plays second string to storytelling of the lowest order.

« La marche de l’empereur » illustrates how much, in « documentary » films too, narrative skills today lag far behind technological prowess : as, in live action movies, breathtaking special effects are wasted to no end by laughable plots, footage which would have proved impossible to shoot a few years ago is misused to replay the most hackneyed story-line in the history of cinema and possibly mankind.

This is a full reversal from the first silent films, and later talkies, when technical limitations hindered narration. As if the history of cinema were technique playing catch up with storytelling, then overtaking it, and cinema were truly the art of the industrial age : technology provides all the innovations, while narration stays stuck in old grooves.

(Large format films remain the exception, as cumbersome, high-cost equipment and resulting shooting budgets still constrain their plots and scope.)

But who could blame the film producers -they would not give a damn, and rightly so- for choosing the most mainstream and profitable story among all those that could have been told ?

« La marche de l’empereur » French voice over alternatively shoots for epic grandeur -the awesome struggle for life of the penguin people- and intimacy -penguin family life-, and always for lofty poetry -Antartica sightseeing beauties-.

It ordinarily achieves second rate emotion and a scientific content close to nil.

As Mrs. Penguin, Romane Bohringer’s slightly plaintive tone follows the stream of the text pathos.

As Mr. Penguin and the main narrator, Charles Berling reins in his lines soapiness. His voice gives them a musical ring and plays them like a melody in free verse. His soft, gentle tone has a true storyteller’s quality and his words sound like a beautiful bed time story or a legendary tale disclosed around a camp fire -and sticks of grilled marshmallow- on a starry summer night.

Listening to him, the Antartica landscape and its ice walls sometimes look like not so distant cousins of Monument Valley cliffs.

His powers are nevertheless not limitless : when male and female penguins perform their awkward mating ritual and he tells us they are dancing, we remain sceptical ; if this is dancing, I am Fred Astaire.

When baby penguin is born and child actor Jules Sitruk -of Richard Berry’s « Moi, César 10 ans ½, 1m39 » fame and already, at 1m39, penguin good size- shares his character’s vision of the world, thoughts, fears and hopes with us, silliness takes over.

However, if film sounds as bad as it looks great, music is the number one culprit : a new age, pseudo symphonic mishmash, with English lyrics sung in a peevish voice, which would convince us it is spirituality-filled.

Constantly invading and redundant, struggling to force emotions on to the audience, it successfully caricatures film music at its worst.

The movie could nevertheless not do without it : several songs play like video clips within the film and extend its paper-thin story line to feature film length : « La marche de l’empereur » is officially 85 minute long, closer to 75 without titles and credits.