Some were bemused earlier this month when Joaquin Phoenix used his entirely expected Oscar win as a less predictable occasion for an impassioned animal-rights plea: It was certainly the first time …
.” It’s not hard to imagine his words as the unspoken subtext to this wholly dialogue-free animal character study, in which an enormous sow on a Norwegian farmyard embarks on an emotive arc of motherhood without any need for human voiceover or twee anthropomorphism: just the still, searching power of an attentive camera.
Shot by the director and Egil Håskjold Larsen in sharply textured, high-contrast black and white on farms in Norway, Britain and Spain — though all its fields and pens feel of a piece thanks to the rich monochrome treatment — “Gunda” might seem, on the face of it, no match for the soaring, “Planet Earth”-style wonderment of “Aquarela.” Yet its unusually intimate point of view proves spectacular in its own right.
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