EMPTYING THE SKIES
Music Box Films
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: B+
Director: Douglas Kass, Roger Kass
Cast: Peter Berthold, Sergio Coen Tanugi, David Conlin, Jonathan Franzen, Martin Hellicar, Alex Heyd, Axel Hirschfeld, Piero Liberati, Andrea Rutigliano
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 4/15/15
Opens: April 22, 2015
Everyone should take an eco-vacation in Costa Rica where you can admire birds like the Toucan, the Tricolored Heron, the Pinnated Bitron, and a hundred other species. You’ll probably think: beautiful birds like these are lucky. They will never be eaten by human beings. That’s true in Costa Rica where environmental laws protecting the woodlands are strictly enforced. But in Europe, you’ll discover another story. The European Union has passed legislation banning the trapping of migratory songbirds, but there’s money in their sale just as there’s lucre in the sale of African elephant ivory despite being against the law. To this end, Jonathan Franzen, an A-list American writer whose upcoming “Purity,” about youthful idealism and murder, and more to this point, “Emptying the Skies,” a 2010 essay published in The New Yorker and translated into several languages, expresses rage about the wholesale decline in the bird population caused by poachers. Douglas Kass and Roger Kass’s documentary by the same name gives visual dimensions to the slaughter of millions of these flying marvels. You’ll leave the theater, perhaps, as angry as the British poet William Blake who wrote, “A robin redbreast in a cage/ Puts all heaven in a rage.” And you’ll go home to a steak dinner. Ironic enough, though the Kasses focus on a group of environmentalists in southern Europe, most of whom speak a good English and who are likely vegans, risking and indeed getting beatings when at times they confront these poachers who claim that they are on private property but who get the response that what the trappers are doing is illegal. The law, however, is enforced in such a lax way that even restaurants put these small birds on their menus. In fact to get a description of a diner enjoying this sordid treat, read Anthony Bourdain’s book “Medium Raw,” where great chefs have Ortolan on the menu, and are eaten by putting napkins over the heads of the diners “hiding their faces from God” and lift the birds gingerly by their hot skulls, placing them feet-first into their mouths.
The birds look exquisite while they are alive, often taking the long seasonal journey to “winter” in Africa and “summer” in southern Europe, sometimes landing on the same tree in Cyprus (for example) that they left. Yet when cooked, heads attached, they appear gruesome enough to turn off all but the most insistent gourmets, who love, as Bourgain says, “the hot rush of burning fat and guts down my throat.” These birds are drowned in Armagnac before cooking, which, according to one chef “isn’t a bad way to die.”
In “Emptying the Skies, “Franzen appears now and then as a narrator, fashionable three-day bristle on his face and with wide, black-framed glasses. Franzen is obviously a fan of CABS, or Committee Against Bird Slaughter, which look for and destroy traps, freeing the small birds. The traps are cruel. One type catches them in a huge net larger than what you’d find on a typical commercial fishing boat. Even crueler, the lime trap is like fly paper. When a bird alights on a twig, it gets stuck. The good guys carefully free the birds, wiping the wings to get rid of all traces of goo, and off the birds go—without even a “thank-you,” as one anti-poacher states. Sometimes, though, a formerly trapped bird is no longer able to fly and must be put out of its misery. A third type of trap involves a large stone which falls unceremoniously atop a hapless bird after the bird touches a twig on the ground, releasing the stone as a mousetrap would unhinge a bar.
Audience members already hip to animal welfare manifestoes will be the best crowd for this doc, and I’d guess that those who enter the theater wearing minks or talking about the coq au vin they will enjoy après théâtre will find the movie of limited interest. Close-up photography is first rate.
Unrated. 77 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – B+
