Joyce Glasser reviews Heart of an Oak (Cert U), 81 mins. In cinemas from July 12, and Digital Downloads from August 12, 2024
Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux’s stunning film has no dialogue or sound effects, but is full of natural sounds, birdsong and a variety of voices, none of them human. There are no car chases and no criminals but there are near death experiences. The star of the film is a 2014-year-old oak tree situated on the edge of a lake in in Centre-Val de Loire, France and its life-giving acorns. The eponymous oak is populated by the supporting cast who co-exist in an intricate, magical ecosystem that should make us think twice about building on the greenbelt.
Shot over a year to show how the weather affects the tree, its inhabitants and neighbours, and over 24-hour periods, to show us what happens at night, we begin with a summer thunder storm that causes alarm. The wind rips through the branches, sending the Eurasian Jay’s into holes in the tree while wood mice scurry into their labyrinthic tunnels beneath its roots.
The rain, however, offers everyone a drink or a bath, even, the strange looking acorn weevil clinging to a leaf and getting a shower. Boars, deer, badgers and a barn owl are silent and invisible.
To the music of Dean Martin’s Sway with Me, we see a pair of acorn weevil’s copulating, but what follows is even more astonishing. The female uses her many legs to cling onto an acorn while a long skinny tusk starting at her nose, bores a hole in the acorn to lay her egg. The acorn might be a cosy nest for a minute baby weevil, but the process does not disturb the acorn’s own embryo, it can infect it, destroying its ability to germinate.
While the oak offers shelter the real demand is for its acorns which offer something for almost everyone. When night falls, the nocturnal wood mice, brave the puddles to hoard acorns free from most predators. When the females do venture forth in the day to bolster the supply for winter, they are in danger. But the better the acorn crop the larger the mice litter.
The boars cross the terrain like mine-sweepers, snorting in everything – insects, rodents, snake hatches and newborns and, of course, acorns – their large snouts to the ground. More delicate and helpful, if no less assiduous, are the Jays. They deserve their nest in the branches rent free for the service they provide disseminating the acorns, which in turn lead to the birth of new Oak trees.
Or that was nature’s plan before human progress interfered. This isn’t part of the film, but it’s worth thinking about how the Eurasian Jay or “Garrulus glandarius” (Garrulus means babbling and glandarius means “of acorns”) has had to adapt. The species has the capacity to spread 1,000 acorns a year over a surface area of up to 20 kilometres. Due to the erosion of their habitat, there are fewer Jays, and those there are, tend to migrate.
Like in Orwell’s Animal Farm, here not all animals (or birds) are created equally. The filmmakers follow a pair of Jay’s – a happy, hardworking couple – as they build a nest for the babies they are planning; squabble, make up, pick insects off one another and gather acorns. We begin to care about the pair, and although they are not anthropomorphised, they are at the centre of a story the filmmakers are building, akin to a subplot.
In the second half of the film the adventures start and so, too, do the doubts about what we are seeing. An Aesculapian Snake winds its way up the tree heading for a panicking red squirrel and the Jay’s nest where we’ve just seen puny, bald heads peeping out. The camera juxtaposes the snake’s progress with the nervous, helpless response of the squirrels and Jays. Just as the snake is about to pounce, the twig on which it has balanced to strike, snaps and both fall to the water below. Death is never shown here, but to the badgers in the lake this is a gift from heaven.
Another suspenseful scene begins when a Northern Goshawk targets the Jays who take off, slightly apart, to evade their predator. It’s a long, tense pursuit. Unable to outrace the hawk, the Jays suddenly take a chance and dive straight into the woodland floor where they wait still and silent. Will the hawk find them?
It is during this scene that you first marvel that a camera could follow this flight action through the trees. Then you begin to wonder if it’s a case of creative editing, with different shots, perhaps taken on different days, or of different Jays edited together.
Heart of an Oak is often breath-taking without the need to resemble an action film. Just the shots of swans gliding into their landing on the lake; the oak in winter, its leaves replaced by snow, or the celebration of birth is enough. In this latter sequence, baby ducks follow their mother across the lake, baby mice, white and blind at birth scramble on top of one of another, while the cute boar cubs play – rather belligerently – in a lovely sequence set to music.
