Entirely devoid of dialogue (unless a bit of Dean Martin on the soundtrack counts), this pleasant nature film observes the seasons passing for 18 months on, around and even underneath a 210-year-old oak tree in Sologne in central France. Technically, some would argue this is not exactly a documentary because some of the sequences are staged or composed of shots taken at totally different times, but scientific accuracy and cinematic authenticity aren’t really the point; this isn’t didactic film-making in the David Attenborough or even March of the Penguins tradition, crafted to drop a bit of natural history knowledge on the viewer. That said, if you sit through the end credits, you’ll at least learn some of the featured creatures’ Latin and French names, with the English handles in the subtitles.
In fact, although the exquisite tree gives the film its title, the eponymous plant-kingdom character doesn’t hold directors Laurent Charbonnier and Michel Seydoux’s focus any more than a stage set. The oak is mostly a background character here, apart from a few animated bits where we see the root systems intermingling with nearby networks, a very modish point that gestures to recent research on how trees “talk” to each other. Instead, Charbonnier and Seydoux sketch in the animal community around the tree – especially the cute mammals that live inside its crevices, like a chipper red squirrel and a family of wood mice. Birds also get a bit of love, with plenty of shots of Eurasian jays and robins frolicking about. In one spectacular sequence, clearly the product of a zillion cameras having been set up to catch bits of footage, we see a jay reeling through the forest, trying to lose a pursuant goshawk, in a scene that rivals Top Gun: Maverick for aerial cinematography of the decade.
The rest of the film, however, is more sedate, quietly anthropomorphic and, frankly, a little dull. The aforementioned Dean Martin cut, the immortal Sway, beds a scene where two acorn weevils mate; this may require parents who are showing the film to younger children to explain what happens when a daddy acorn weevil and a mummy acorn weevil love each other very much. At times it’s hard not to feel like the whole point of the exercise is to show they’ve got a macro lens and they’re going to use it, but the film just about manages to add up to something more than just pretty cinematic wallpaper.
• Heart of an Oak is on the Icon Film Channel from 10 June and UK cinemas from 12 July
