The Ornithologist (MA). Director: João Pedro Rodrigues. Starring: Paul Hamy, Xelo Cagiao, Han Wen, Chan Suan. 118 minutes
Portuguese provocateur Joao Pedro Rodrigues' latest film opens with a quote from St Anthony of Padua: 'Whoever approached the Spirit will feel its warmth, hence his heart will be lifted up to new heights.'
It's more than an obligatory epitaph; the film's titular bird-watching hero (Hamy) is named Fernando, which is the birth name of the venerated Anthony. To know as much provides one key to unlocking the meaning of this contemplative but infuriatingly opaque film; others will no doubt depend upon whatever work the viewer is willing to bring to bear in order to decipher its manifold symbolic digressions.
Fernando is explicitly an avatar for the 13th century saint. Early in the film he is seen encamped on the bank of a river in the remote Portuguese wilderness, clad in a brown hoodie that emulates the brown robes of the Franciscan order of which Anthony was a member.
The act of bird-watching itself (one long, captivating stretch of the first act is concerned with Fernando drifting about a river canyon in his kayak, watching rare and endangered birds through his binoculars) evokes Anthony's association with St Francis of Assisi, the order's founder (and the present Pope's namesake), and his 'sermon to birds'.
So captivated is he by the flight of one particular bird that Fernando fails to note his descent into violent river rapids. The wreck of his kayak marks time with the passage through life of Anthony, whose ship was once blown off course en route from Morocco to Portugal.
To this point the film has been largely naturalistic, threaded with a sense of the numinous, captured mainly in cinematographer (and regular Rodrigues collaborator) Rui Poças' glorious work photographing the vast beauty of the physical environment, and the seemingly self-aware activity of birds in a world that is more theirs than it will ever be Fernando's.
"The one constant is vast, beautiful, terrifying nature, and man's piddling place within it."
From this point the film veers more deeply into the surreal, and its engagement with religious symbols and myths becomes far more subversive.
Half-drowned, Fernando comes under the care of a pair of Chinese pilgrims (Wen and Suan) who have become utterly lost after straying from the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Moments before stumbling upon the unconscious Fernando, they are seen kneeling and praying to St Anthony —