Lessons (2015)

Directed by: Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud | 92 minutes | documentary

The French master duo Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud already enchanted the viewer with beautiful nature documentaries set in the air (‘Le peuple migrateur’) and below sea level (‘Océans’), respectively. After we floated through the skies on goose wings in those documentaries and glided through the oceans with graceful manta rays, the French documentary makers returned to the land and nature of their home continent with ‘Les saisons’. ‘Les saisons’ shows the seasons of European nature, but is also a journey back in time.

The story begins about eighty thousand years ago, when Europe was still largely covered with pristine and virgin forests. At the time, human influence was still limited, so that large parts of the European territory were still the site of impressive animals such as bison, wild horses, deer, bears, wolves and lynx. This approach is interesting, on the one hand because it deviates from the pattern that most nature films use, and on the other because the look back in time shows people how different Europe looked before the advance of modern man.

As a species, Homo sapiens doesn’t fare too well in ‘Les saisons’. The film paints a picture of the pristine primeval forests as paradise on earth, until we humans appeared en masse to spoil nature’s feast. According to ‘Les saisons’, in the Arcadian and man-poor era, all animals lived in perfect harmony with each other. The fox would crawl into the den with his young in the evenings, while the owl approvingly greeted the sunset from his tree. This creates a fairytale-like atmosphere that gives the film extra cachet, but also paints a slightly too romantic picture. Of course it is true that the expansion of man was disastrous for many European natural treasures and Europe as a whole has certainly not become more beautiful over the centuries. On the other hand, the wilderness is also a rock-hard battleground, where eating or being eaten is in many cases the guiding principle. We see little of that less cuddly, sometimes gruesome side of life in the wild in ‘Les saisons’, which means that reality is sometimes portrayed a bit too idyllic.

The makers of ‘Les saisons’ filmed their piece for four years in Poland, Romania, Norway, Scotland, and – yes – even our own little country. Wolves chasing a wild horse, imposing reindeer herds, bison wading through a thick layer of snow and mysterious snowy owls, these are just a few examples of all the beautiful things that pass in review. The smaller stuff is not skipped either and is often brought to the fore in an astonishingly intimate way. The stunningly beautiful images, which are rarely provided with additional information, are not inferior to the quality we are used to from BBC Earth, for example, and show a Europe that many of us barely know. Unfortunately – compared to tens of thousands of years ago – these are only fragments of landscape in depopulated regions that have been returned to nature or remnants of primeval nature, terrestrial islands that have escaped the all-scorching juggernaut known as the modern belief in progress.

With ‘Les saisons’, Cluzaud and Perrin once again live up to their reputation as skilled nature filmmakers. The film can mainly be characterized as an audiovisual work of art that moves, fascinates and enchants for an hour and a half. The informative aspect is clearly subordinate to the praiseworthy message that ‘Les saisons’ conveys in a powerful and unmistakable way: we would do well to restore the balance between man and nature in Europe.