CANBERRA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: This story of a young brother and sister setting out to look for a lost pigeon on the grasslands of Togo initially looks set to become an African answer to those Iranian films about children on a quest such as Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon.
Yet as the children's journey becomes stranger and stranger it gradually dawns that this is far from a slice of sensitive naturalism but an elliptical journey into a place beyond time and earthly space.
Despite being a Belgian-French co-production directed by a Belgian, Gust Van Den Berghe, and based on a novel by fellow countryman Maurice Maeterlinck, Blue Bird seems utterly African in not only its setting but also its unconventional narrative style, which appears to draw from storytelling modes possibly more familiar to African than Western audiences. Here a savannah of mud compounds and waist-high grass populated by spirits, demons and even a character who calls himself the King of Time, presiding over a group of children yet to be born.
It's a film both beautiful and nutty that brings to mind the evocative name of a classic album by David Byrne and Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a title borrowed from a novel by Nigeria's Amos Tutuola.
The film opens with the boy showing his sister a blue pigeon, which he is looking after for a friend. When their mother bathes them the creature wanders off. Thus do our pair set off on a quest, tiny figures in a vast landscape that here and there seems to have erupted spontaneously into bush fires.
The first people they encounter on their adventure are their grandparents, though it turns out both are dead. Not long after they meet up with their carpenter father on a hilltop, where he has strapped a freshly-made coffin – one of the film's many references to death – onto the back of his parked motorcycle.
But is this really their father or another ghostly apparition? The peculiar episode that follows, where he gives a lift to a woman stranded by the side of the road who interrupts their journey so she can lay down and die, is open to interpretation vis-Á -vis its relation to actuality. Even weirder is an episode where a group of forest spirits threaten the children in revenge against their father's crimes against the trees.
The young boy and girl are charmers, though at some point their characters' conversations and behaviour goes beyond the usual naivety of children to become altogether more mysterious. Why, for instance, do they try to discover whether a bird they find – possibly the one they are seeking – is alive by shaking it next to their ears? Why not just look at its bobbing head?
Van Den Berghe's sense of widescreen composition is consistently arresting. There's one scene, of the boy lost in the tall grass as a storm brews, that visually is utterly breathtaking. But the decision to shoot all the footage using a heavy blue filter is frustrating because it's overdone.
Add this to the meanderingly episodic structure, snail-like pace and often baffling narrative, and the film becomes almost soporific. Fans of Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's Cannes Palme d'Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives will find this of undeniable interest. Others, perhaps less so.
