Winged Migration (2001)

FILM REVIEW; A Beady-Eyed Perspective on Migrating Birds

The breathtaking cinematography of migrating birds in Jacques Perrin's mystical documentary ''Winged Migration'' transports you to an exalted realm where nature operates under its own inviolable laws and humanity is portrayed as a crude, destructive interloper in the natural scheme of things.

The movie, whose few words, spoken by the director, are explanatory captions, offers a sweeping global tour from a bird's-eye view, dressed up with a new-age score by Bruno Coulais of swelling choral music and pulsing beats. (Mr. Coulais also composed the music for Mr. Perrin's insect documentary, ''Microcosmos.'') And as the images of flying birds (along with the often harsh, seemingly urgent sounds of their cries) in perfect, swooping formation accumulate, the film speaks wistfully to humankind's residual longing to soar through the heavens without mechanical help.

For much of the movie, filmed over three years using five crews of more than 450 people, including 17 pilots and 14 cinematographers, the camera flies alongside, above and below many species of birds as they make their annual round trips. In some cases that journey will carry them more than 10,000 miles between the tropics and the Arctic. All sorts of ingenious devices, from remote control gliders to ultra-light aircraft, were used to film the birds, which appear unaware of the technology recording their activities.

Although the movie was filmed on all seven continents, its visits to the Amazon (where you watch a captured tropical bird free itself from a cage aboard a cargo ship) and the Sahara, its moments in Africa and South America are token stops in a film whose wildlife generally prefers more temperate climes.

Each species is cursorily identified along with facts and figures about its migratory habits that suggest the statistics attached to jet planes in a book about military aircraft. But the information (provided by Mr. Perrin and by occasional subtitles) is very sketchy. All you're given is a few general rules about how birds' sensitivity to temperature and the cycles of nature work to guide them like a kind of instinctive radar and how each generation learns from the one before to identify landmarks on the annual journey.

For all the soundtrack's oohing and ahhing and the glorious scenery on display, ''Winged Migration,'' which opens today in Manhattan, is a reasonably tough-minded film when contemplating the rigors of avian life. Bird migration, Mr. Perrin reminds us more than once, isn't a mystical spiritual pilgrimage but a matter of survival, and during migration many of the birds die. Some of the most haunting images show birds feeding their young by cramming food into their open beaks.

But the movie scrupulously shies away from close-up images of birds devouring their prey. (Ominous birds like vultures and even crows are nowhere to be found). Two scenes shows birds struggling to free themselves from man-made sludge, and two or three others observe birds being picked out of the sky by hunters. But except for the image of a wounded bird being covered with crabs, there are no graphic images of death, and these images are offered without editorial comment.

Yet ultimately ''Winged Migration'' does not need words to conjure its spell. Its juxtapositions of avian life with monuments (both man-made, like the Eiffel Tower, and natural, like the stark outcrops of Monument Valley) and its awe in the face of nature's power (an Arctic blizzard, a thundering avalanche) speak for themselves. It may sound facetious, but ''Winged Migration'' provides such an intense vicarious experience of being a flapping airborne creature with the wind in its ears that you leave the theater feeling like an honorary member of another species.

WINGED MIGRATION
Directed by Jacques Perrin; written by Stéphane Durand and Mr. Perrin; produced by Christophe Barratier and Mr. Perrin; Michael Benjamin, Sylvie Carcedo-Dreujou, Laurent Charbonnier, Luc Drion, Laurent Fleutot, Philippe Garguil, Dominique Gentil, Bernard Lutic, Thierry Machado, Stéphane Martin, Fabrice Moindrot, Ernst Sasse, Michael Terrasse and Thierry Thomas, directors of photography; edited by Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte; music by Bruno Coulais; Régis Nicolino, production designer. Released by Sony Pictures Classics. At the Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street, Manhattan. Running time: 89 minutes. This film is rated G.

WITH: Jacques Perrin (narrator) and puffins, sandhill cranes, pelicans, ducks, Canada geese, snow geese, European white storks, bald eagles, albatrosses, penguins, turtledoves, black-necked swans, robins, Arctic terns, egrets, macaws and black-headed ibises.