Film review: The Metamorphosis of Birds blends lush imagery and poetry in story of longing and loss
Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos’s aching memoir straddles the realms of visual art and film
The Cinematheque streams The Metamorphosis of Birds until July 22
THERE’S A MOMENT in the luminous cinematic memoir-poem The Metamorphosis of Birds when a boy points out to his brother that the trees around them once witnessed their parents’ birth.
Human life is ephemeral in Portuguese director Catarina Vasconcelos’s aching debut feature about mortality, love, and family, but nature provides a connection with the eternal.
Mixing painting-like imagery, fictionalized dramatic sequences, and the reading of letters, it begins with an extreme closeup of an old man’s eyes as he reflects on the way the world has changed without his wife, Beatriz.
From there, Vasconcelos collages together the fragments of a life. Her father was a sailor spending long months away at sea while Beatriz stayed at home raising six children. His homesickness and her yearning for his return are expressed in a series of letters—ones he ordered destroyed upon his death.
The film is a slow-burn but mesmerizing study in longing and loss. Vasconcelos fills the screen with painterly imagery: a woman’s paring knife peeling a quince, still lifes of gutted pomegranates and halved grapefruits, children’s hands delicately burying a dead bird in a handkerchief, and the endless rustling of tree leaves.
The film works in the same way that memory does—through flashes of enigmatic imagery, moments, and words. Sometimes it pushes its poetry too hard: a son’s coming of age and sexual awakening, expressed through a boy kissing a white sculpture of a female head, is one of the more affected moments. Peacock feathers, which resemble the other recurring image of eyes, serve as a little too heavy a motif.
But the film's cumulative effect is moving in ways that are profound and hard to put into words. A mother grieving the loss of her children to adulthood; the pain of living on when you've lost a spouse; the maternal bond that persists beyond death. Vasconcelos finds a new, imagistic way to express these vast and almost uncontainable ideas, in a work that boldly straddles the realms of visual art and film.
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