Review by Amos Lassen
By: Amos Lassen
"The Ornithologist" ("O Ornitólogo")
Swept Away
Amos Lassen
Fernando (Paul Hamy), a solitary ornithologist, goes out looking for black storks when he is swept away by the rapids. He is Rescued by a couple of Chinese p...
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"The Ornithologist" ("O Ornitólogo")
Swept Away
Amos Lassen
Fernando (Paul Hamy), a solitary ornithologist, goes out looking for black storks when he is swept away by the rapids. He is Rescued by a couple of Chinese pilgrims and enters an eerie and dark forest, trying to get back on his track.
Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues "The Ornithologist" is unlike any film you have see before as it takes us into the unspoiled nature in Tras-os-Montes where Fernando decides to search for an endangered species of black stork. As he observes the birds from his canoe, the rapids take hold of him and he is miraculously saved by two Chinese tourists on their way to Santiago de Compostela, but then escapes into the forest, hoping to find his way back. The forest, which is wild and mysterious, is quick to show its dark side, throwing obstacles and encounters in his path. We soon see that he is not only on a journey to see the storks but he is also in search of himself.
João Pedro Rodrigues is considered to be an undisputed master in the art of metamorphosis, confusion and surrealism. We see that "The Ornithologist" is driven by men and animals, past and present, life and death, pain and eroticism, reality and imagination and these make it a dreamlike film that skillfully mixes apocalyptic and mystical elements. The film explores the points of encounter between different existential realities through Fernando's subconscious as if trying to get to and surgically extract his essence. The dangerous but captivating forest and the beauty of the animals that live it, become the incarnation of Fernando's inner world that is ambiguous, broken and sensual.
I understand that Rodrigues wanted to understand ho St. Anthony, the protector saint who is omnipresent in Portuguese society and culture lives on the inside of him. Fernando (who we can consider to be a Saint Antonio in the making) is the literal embodiment of this search for spirituality (completely void of religiousness) and this thirst for change leads him to the source of his desire. Certain biographical details from Saint Anthony's life influenced Rodrigues: : his fascination for nature and animals, the shipwreck, saving a man with his magical breath, then making him rich with his imagination and his experiences. "The Ornithologist" is a film in which nothing is as it seems, although everything seems possible. The forest becomes the imaginary elsewhere where Catholicism, superstition and tradition come together mysteriously and shamelessly. That religion is called into question, as if suddenly and unexpectedly being exposed might seem audacious to some. Fernando has a physical human experience on the border between reality and fiction, mysticism and paganism, with a layer of the erotic making this blasphemous and necessary film (did you ever expect to see those two terms together?)
.Rodrigues' story of Saint Anthony of Padua modernizes, fractures, and queers up the 13th-century cleric's journey to divinity and, some will say that he does so with a disregard for either respectability or historical fact. An ornithologist, Fernando sets out with only a canoe, a tent, a pair of binoculars, and a tape recorder to aid his investigations for the rare birds. Those birds that he watches almost seem to return his gaze with a kind of hypnotic pull and because of it, he did not see the rapids up ahead and he is knocked when his canoe overturned.
The apparent Christian generosity of those who found him turns out to be a cover for their desire for bondage and castration. This is just the first encounter Fernando has that takes out of the present and pushes him back into the past. Some of the episodes are totally bizarre: a mute shepherd boy who loves to swim nude, a band of brightly clad Mirandese-speaking pagans who work themselves into a ritualistic frenzy, bare-breasted Amazons on the hunt bearing modern rifles. Each of these bridges various moods and references, "with eeriness giving way to awe, serenity to violence, the religious to the erotic, and the horror film to the western". Rodrigues has the ability to make the strangest idea seem coherent with the result of baffling, sensuous beauty. We see one of the Chinese pilgrims unable to stop herself from licking the other's wounded knee, a wander through a forest populated only by taxidermic specimens, the sticking a finger into a chest wound lubricated by .
All of the countless birds on Fernando's journey keep looking back at him with a gaze that quietly upends standard perspectives. After his canoe flips over, two psychotic, bible-bashing Chinese "Christian" women tie him up as he wears only a pair of white briefs and they plan to castrate him the following day. Somehow Fernando finds his inner strength and escapes into the wilderness. Then he starts his meeting with others- a troupe of failed Cirque Soleil performers and he gets peed upon, a deaf, teat-sucking goat-herder and they go skinny-dipping and have sex but things do not end well. I was lost through part of what followed especially when all the stuffed animals start to appear. I am hoping one day to understand all that I saw here!