Watch the trailer.
If Cervantes might have balked at Albert Serra's Don Quixote in his remarkable debut,
Honor de cavalleria (VIFF 06), then St. Matthew, Jesus' second best-known disciple (after Judas), would squint to recognize Serra's Wise Men trudging across the desert to see the Holy Child in the manger in
Birdsong, or as some prefer to call it by its original Catalan title,
El cant dels ocells.
There is no European filmmaker to have emerged in the past five years (at least) to make the distinct impression that their art is absolute, inviolate, a discipline, a calling, a quest, which makes Serra and his Wise Men an ideal and extraordinary match of artist and subject. Slowly, patiently, Serra's camera observes this trio of portly loons (Lluís Carbó and Lluís Serrat Masanellas--both returning from
Honor--and Lluís Serrat Batlle) making an impossible trip across deserts, plains and hills, pausing along the way to bicker, joke, snooze, and chat about their visions, which embrace the fantastical with a stunning matter-of-factness. Joseph and Mary (VIFF's own Mark Peranson, and Montse Triola) wait as if they sense who's coming, though there's lurking fear of King Herod's approaching (off-screen) Roman army, looking to kill the baby Jesus.
Made with the same kind of devotional Catholic belief in the spirituality of the material (and vice versa) and the inviolability of faith that informed Alain Cavalier's masterpiece,
Thé
rè
se--a film hugely admired by Serra--
Birdsong delivers and adapts the verses in the first two chapters of St. Matthew's Gospel to the framework of Bazinian ground, space and time. In the current course of films being made around the world that demand new engagement with the essentials of cinema, it is about as important a work as has been made in the past three years.
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