O Ornitólogo (The Ornithologist)

seen at the London Flare Festival on 26 March 2017

Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues has created an intriguing variation of a medieval hagiography relating to St Anthony of Padua, in which Fernando, an ornithologist (Paul Hamy), gradually becomes an avatar of the saint in modern times after a boating accident on the Douro river.

The opening sequences of the film are beautifully shot as Fernando swims in the river then sits beside a small campfire on the river bank and takes out his binoculars to follow the bird life. However, the next morning when he is kayaking downstream, he is again completely distracted by his bird-watching and he is overturned in the rapids.

What follows becomes increasingly peculiar. First he is rescued by two young Chinese girls who have lost their way on the Camino to Compostella - indeed they are very far from where they should be since they are in northern Portugal. They seem friendly but their rather warped sense of propriety and entitlement leads them to truss him up over a stream, and it is only with great difficulty that he escapes.

Mobile phone coverage is erratic; there is a group of young men completely clad and masked in strange coloured ribbons who are apparently preparing for some arcane and no doubt pagan ritual; there is a deaf and dumb goatherd who encourages Fernando to go skinny-dipping with him, but who threatens him with a knife when Fernando tries to question him about why he has some of Fernando's possessions - this leads to the accidental death of the goatherd; there are some Amazonian huntresses who only speak Latin but who offer to take Fernando back to civilisation ('it will only take a phone call' they say - in Latin).

In short, everything becomes increasingly odd, and even though it seems that Fernando has his throat slit - there is a copious amount of splattering blood - we finally see him together with the (speaking) brother of the goatherd making his way into the modern town of Padua, by which time he has been transformed from the actor hitherto playing the part, into the director himself.

I'm not sure that the movement from the sheer wonder of the natural world in the Douro valley to the mysterious and mystical outcome is completely successful. The individual episodes are often striking, but the strange twists of narrative are disorienting. Some aspects of the experience are treated naturalistically - the privation of being tied up, the need to find food and water - whereas others seem too outlandish - the idea of being tied up in the first place, the frenzy of the pagan young men, the bare-chested huntresses speaking Latin. Obviously we are proceeding from the ordinary (if particularly beautiful) world to a more mysterious place, to say nothing of the final transformation, but I was not entirely convinced. Perhaps if I was personally more in tune with medieval Catholic spirituality I would have felt more sympathetic to what was being attempted.