"Birdsong"

By David Hudson on 02/25/2009

[Updated through 2/27]

"'Birdsong' ('El Cant dels Ocells'), a lovely and strange new film by the Catalan director Albert Serra, is less a retelling of the Nativity story than a dream about it, filtered in lovely black and white through a sensibility that recalls Luis Buñuel and Samuel Beckett." AO Scott in the New York Times.

"An intractable practitioner of droll minimalism, Serra is somewhat more absurdist than such fellow film-fest uncompromisers as Portugal's Pedro Costa or Argentina's Lisandro Alonso," writes in the Voice. "Or, perhaps, as 'Birdsong' is a mechanism built to ensure that the spectators share the protagonists' faith, he's more religious. Shot in rich, almost gorgeous black-and-white, 'Birdsong' is less about the gifts of the magi than the play of light over barren, nearly lunar, landscapes."

You might also want to see (or revisit) Robert Koehler's review for Cinema Scope, the magazine edited by Mark Peranson, who appears in "Birdsong" and who has made "a kind of experimental 'making of'" called "Waiting for Sancho."

Opens today for a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates: "Aleatory and teleonomic, 'Birdsong' bears a somewhat familiar resemblance to the Straub-Huillet school of adaptation and philosophy; however, Albert Serra plays a game of improvisation that branches this genealogy into a new space of chance." And "Waiting for Sancho" figures into Ryland Walker Knight's piece for The Auteurs' Notebook as well.

"In the same way that Jim Jarmusch used humor, beauty, and spirituality to deliver a defiantly original revisionist Western with 'Dead Man,' Serra does the same thing with Birdsong,'" writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail; "yet here, Serra is out to revise an older, more deeply mythical tale."

Update, 2/27: "'Birdsong' rises to the divine on the quality of its images, but it always grounds its spiritual aspirations in an acceptance of the resolutely mundane," writes Andrew Schenker. "Through its long static takes and, with one significant exception, its lack of significant event, the film gives the audience sufficient time to register both sides of the equation, the striving for sublimity and the embrace of the everyday, each of which derive their power from the presence of the other."

[Photo: "Birdsong," Capricci Films, 2008]

Tags: Albert Serra, Birdsong, Mark Peranson