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Rating: What a pain when bored people say: nothing ever happens here! The days are all the same and what a drag, what a bore and blah blah blah.
Well, this film-documentary “Microcosmos: The Grass People” directed and shot by Claude Nurisdany and Marie Perennou in 1996 is here to prove the contrary: everything is in constant motion and even in very small worlds, almost invisible to the human eye, there is life, death, action, things happening even if we don't realize it! Have you ever thought about it?
Take your own garden, for example. Now, pretend to become tiny and small (like those in the movie “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” remember that?) and try to see what's happening among the blades of grass, between two clumps of earth, among the plant roots, between the dried dog poop and the extinguished cigarette, among ants and unbearable insects that we normally crush by the dozens under our branded Nike boots.
Cool, huh? Would you have ever believed it? In this microcosm, indeed, it seems the days never end as nothing happens, yet in many respects, it is truly interesting and magical to quietly observe the antics of these strange creatures that populate the flowerbeds at our feet's height!
You feel a bit like worms (or ants, depending) participating for over an hour in the weird laws that govern the lives of flying worms, tiger mosquitoes, gorilla flies, and gnu beetles never seen before, and it seems really impossible to think this film was made with 2 years of preparation and a whopping 3 years (I say THREE!) of just filming.
Just four months filming two snails mating (hence the legendary fame), the spider living in an underwater air bubble, workaholic ladybugs rolling balls of poop up and down the terrain with countless hardships, bizarre camouflaged worms stuffing themselves with food: in short, an unparalleled fatigue for the crew and the entire organizational machine! A triumph of technique & patience truly commendable for these two sadomasochistic directors who invented devices and equipment at the edge of known technology just to shoot these memorable scenes (I suppose often “one take and done” …especially with the snails in heat! - which are, strangely enough, the scenes I remember most vividly!).
Ultimately, a practically silent little film (in many aspects similar to the other film "Koyananisqatsi" by Godfrey Reggio featuring music by Philip Glass) where the actors here are the insects, at times comedic and at times dramatic, and where something trivial like two drops of water for us (humans) can turn into a tsunami of catastrophic proportions for these Lilliputian characters. Sure, it's long and definitely not suited for cinema (I remember during the screening there were massive snores in the rows in front that drowned out the sound of the cicadas in the film!) but the experiment was a huge public success, especially at home, and a moderate success even here (it even won the Grand Prix Technique for special effects at the 1996 Cannes Festival!).
Of course... the idea of debuting with a film where you DON’T pay for choreography, DON’T pay for actors, DON’T pay speakers and only pay for the Soundtrack (splendid, by the way, by Bruno Coulais) and the direction of photography, isn't at all a bad idea (but let's not spread the word too much given the current state of cinema in Italy, it would spark unprecedented union claims!)
Those French, if they didn't exist you'd have to invent them (or strangle them, depending)!
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