Away with the birds

This is the lovely Jacob Auzanneau. He starred in the second of today's double bill of movies -- and there'll be more of him in a bit.


But the day started with the man everyone wanted to be their dad -- Gregory Peck, in a lustruous nitrate Technicolor print of 1946's The Yearling at the National Film Theatre (which is now, apparently, the only cinema in the entire country which is licenced to show films on nitrate prints).


It's ironic that I can only find black and white images from The Yearling, because the colour is extraordinary: you want to lick the screen to taste it.

I saw it ages ago, when I was a kid, and I remember thinking at the time that it was a bit sentimental. But it packs a bit of a punch and, seeing it through adult eyes, I can see what great performances are given by both Peck and co-star Jane Wyman (as the uptight bitch of a mother -- but, as becomes clear, she's that way for entirely understandable reasons).


The story is about a dirt-poor family living on the margins, in the depths of Florida's marshy forests. There's one son, an 11 year old, and he's lonely -- desperate to be allowed a pet.


He ends up with a small faun, but that's the start of a chain of events that reminded me of the moral from a film I was banging on about last year, where a boy who breeds songbirds takes in an injured fox which he tames: never let a fox in the hen-house.


The Yearling isn't a great film, despite both Peck's extraordinarily tender relationship with both his wife and his son, and Wyman's delightful performance as the mother. In fact, all too often it reminded me of the childhood joke in my family at the number of times Anne of Green Gables would whine the phrase "Oh, Marilla" -- except in this film it was "oh, Pa...". Well worth seeing, though, for the quality of that print.

Ivul was quite a different kettle of fish.


Set in the very region from whence I've just returned from my hols, it's based in the decaying grandeur of a rather vast French mansion and wooded estate in the Pyrenees.


The father is from a very wealthy Russian family that fled the revolution. He lives with his manservant, his wife and their four delightfully wild children.


There's an absolutely exquisite sexual tension between the eldest daughter and son: something both of them clearly feel and play with, without quite knowing where to take it or how to set boundaries.


After being discovered in the middle of an exploration, the father throws his son out and forbids him ever to set foot on his land again. The boy takes his father at his word, and moves into the trees where he lives for season after season.


Director Andrew Kotting is a major film-making talent (another visual artist who has found his way into movies). His film is magical and sordid in equal measures, perfectly capturing the ecstasy and the corporeality of the human condition. It plays with time, moving us backwards (sometimes literally) and forwards, speeding things up and slowing them down -- but none of it feels tricksy or forced, and these characters root us in the story.

At one point it feels to me like we're being made to think of fairy tales, of the enchanted forest where the thick vines block the path, and the mansion and its inhabitants are sealed-off from the world. But the film always felt utterly real.


My friend D., who usually prefers his films to be bog-standard and linear, also liked it a lot.

I am giving Ivul two major thumbs up, even for those of us who are less enthusiastic than others about sibling incest plots.