Film reviews round-up: The Eagle Huntress, Through the Wall, Ballerina, The Son of Joseph

A soaring documentary of a feminist journey, an Israeli screwball comedy, Black Swan for kids, and a baroque coming-of-age tale

The Eagle Huntress (U)

★★★★☆

Dir: Otto Bell, 87 mins, featuring: Aisholpan Nurgaiv

Executive produced and narrated by Star Wars actress Daisy Ridley, The Eagle Huntress is a remarkable documentary, one that combines superb National Geographic-style photography with a storyline that plays out like a real-life folktale with a feminist undertow.

Its main character is Aisholpan, a 13-year-old girl from a remote Mongolian community who yearns to become an eagle hunter, just like her father and her grandfather before him. The tradition stretches back over 1,000 years to beyond the time of Genghis Khan.

The nomadic tribes rely on the fur and food they catch with the eagles to sustain them through the very brutal winters. The hitch for Aisholpan is that the village elders grumble that women are too “fragile” for such an arduous business and they should stay at home, milking the cows and making the tea while their menfolk head off on expeditions. Aisholpan’s dreams risk being dashed at the outset but she fervently believes girls can do anything that boys can.

This certainly isn’t purist documentary – but nor was Robert Flaherty’s famous 1922 film Nanook Of The North. There are times here when director Otto Bell (making his feature debut) appears to be staging scenes and moulding events so that the narrative unfolds in just the way that he wants.

A late sequence in which an eagle, under Aisholpan’s control, kills a fox marks a spectacular finale but Bell provides very little context. He doesn’t explain how the fox dies or how long it took Aisholpan and her father to track it down.

The cinematography here is stunning. Bell (presumably by placing his camera on a drone) often gives us an eagle eye view of the landscapes below. He also provides a ground-eye insight into everyday life in Aisholpan’s village.

This seems to be a traditional community, unchanged over the years, and yet the 13-year-old is at school in a nearby town where the other kids in the classroom play handball and modernity has long since intruded. There are hints that the family’s way of life may soon come under threat.

Bell isn’t above foregrounding the exoticism of the nomads’ lives. Occasionally, Aisholpan will be seen in a tracksuit, looking like any other girl of her age. More often, the film shows her and her father in their traditional clothes. They wear elaborate furs and beautifully brocaded jackets and trousers.

The eagles themselves are huge birds with enormous wingspans. They’re not pets. You fear for Aisholpan when one soars down from the mountaintop to land with a crunch on her heavily padded arm, drawn in part by the meat she is holding. As Ridley’s voiceover tells us, the hunters only keep the eagles for seven years. The birds are then returned to the wilderness “to continue the circle of life”.

Aisholpan makes a thoroughly engaging protagonist, a mischievous teenage girl with a well-nigh permanent smile on her face who just happens to have a near genius for working with the eagles. Gratifyingly for the filmmakers, when she and her father ride many miles to compete in an eagle hunting competition, she is by far the best.

Aisholpan’s eagle does exactly as she bids it and catches the animals being dragged as its quarry. The judges all give her top marks but even that isn’t enough to convince the conservative old timers. They insist that only when she goes out into the wilds will she really prove herself.

Daisy Ridley’s narration is used sparingly. Bell’s approach is observational rather than polemical. He touches on the tensions within the nomadic community. Aisholpan has a dream of becoming a doctor as well as of becoming an eagle huntress. Her father is an expert horseman but also rides a motorbike.

Rather than bemoan the community’s vanishing way of life, the director simply shows us Aisholpan and her father as they go about the business of eagle hunting. It’s painstaking work that requires finding a baby “eaglet” that is strong enough to survive without its mother but not yet strong enough to fly away.

To do this, they have to clamber up cliffs. Then they have to train the little creature. The hunting expeditions themselves are perilous affairs, requiring them to ride on horseback across very icy terrain.

The director’s achievement is not only to have to have discovered his subjects but to have won their trust and affection. He has persuaded them to allow him to film them at every stage of the process as Aisholpan tries to prove herself as a hunter. At times, the filmmaking can feel contrived. Bell uses eerie music to heighten the sense of exoticism and danger surrounding the eagle hunting.

His editing is also sometimes manipulative. Nonetheless, he and his crew have obviously gone to extreme lengths themselves, clambering up mountains and venturing into very forbidding terrain, to capture their footage. In doing so, they’ve managed to make a documentary that belies its obviously modest budget both in its epic quality and in its rugged beauty.

Through The Wall (U)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Rama Burshtein, 110 mins, starring: Dafi Alferon, Noa Koller, Oded Leopold, Ronny Merhavi, Udi Persi, Jonathan Rozen

Rama Burshtein’s new film may be set in an ultra-orthodox Israeli community but it plays like an old fashioned Hollywood screwball comedy. Michal (Noa Koller) is planning to get married but is jilted by her fiancé. Rather than cancel the wedding, she makes the booking anyway and gives herself just over 20 days to find a new husband. Her faith tells her that God will surely find the man for her.

Over the course of the film, Michal has various encounters with potential Mr Rights, nearly all of whom turn out to be Mr Wrongs. These include a blind psychoanalyst and a pop star she meets in bizarre circumstances while praying. Some of her potential husbands are put off by her unlikely career profession – she runs a petting zoo.

Others find her flighty and impulsive, or think she is mocking them. Her family, in particular a domineering mother, are of only minor support, and she is incensed when a treacherous friend hooks up with her ex.

Koller plays the bride in search of a groom with considerable charm and humour. She makes it clear that Michal isn't just a flaky thirty-something victim looking for a husband on a whim. There is something heroic about her quest – a sense that she is finally taking her fate in her own hands.

If she does succumb to self-pity, it is only very fleetingly. The film is put together in almost as ramshackle and improvisatory way as Michal's wedding is planned. The script, though, is witty and sharp in its observations on love, courtship, and wedding parties - and Michal is one of those screwball heroines you just can't help but root for.

Ballerina (U)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Éric Warin, Eric Summer, 89 mins, voiced by: Elle Fanning, Dane DeHaan

This is a real curiosity, a French animated ballet film clearly aimed at kids but which strays into some of the same areas as Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan. It combines extreme sentimentality with some very harsh observations about what it takes to succeed as a top ballerina.

Felicie (voiced in tremulous tones by Elle Fanning) is a little orphan girl from Brittany who runs away to Paris with her best friend, would be inventor Victor (voiced by Dane DeHaan). Her dream is to dance for the Paris Opera.

Odette, the beautiful cleaning lady (who somewhat improbably was once a prima Ballerina before crocking her leg), takes pity on her. Red haired and very pugnacious, Felicié has the “energy of a bullet” but the finesse of a depressed elephant. Even so, after stealing a letter addressed to the aristocratic would-be dancer Camille (for whose mother Odette works), she gets an audition.

The filmmakers do a fair job of portraying the kind of 19th century Paris written about in Balzac novels, hierarchical and full of snobbery and secrecy. The Eiffel Tower is under construction, as is the Statue Of Liberty, about to be shipped off to America (but a useful prop for one of the most far fetched scenes).

The film progresses precisely as might have been expected with tumbles and reversals aplenty before Felicié's talent finally becomes apparent when she vies for a part in The Nutcracker. We all know that the little “rat” will blossom forth, even if Camille’s vengeful Cruella De Vil-like mother comes after her with a mallet.

Ballerina is at its best in the dancing scenes, which are animated with verve and realism, with every leap and pirouette finely rendered. The rivalry between Felicié and Camille has a viciousness about it and the film doesn’t skimp from showing the ruthlessness as well as the dedication that dancers need to make the grade. It is also shamelessly mawkish and utterly predictable.

The Son Of Joseph (12A)

★★★☆☆

Dir: Eugène Greem, 113 mins, starring: Victor Ezenfis, Natacha Régnier, Fabrizio Rongione, Mathieu Amalric, Maria de Medeiros

Eugène Green is a distinctive and very eccentric filmmaker, renowned for his “baroque” approach to contemporary subject matter. The Son Of Joseph is coproduced by the Dardennes brothers but is nothing like their work. Other filmmakers would tackle its story, about a teenage boy’s search for his absent father, in realist fashion. Green’s approach is very different.

The film is full of biblical references, nods in the direction of Caravaggio and bursts of choral music. The performance style is deliberately very arch. The actors look each other in the face and speak their lines in self-consciously arch and deliberate fashion.

Vincent (Ezenfis) is a teenager whose single mother (Régnier) works as a nurse. She refuses to reveal the identity of his father so he tries to find it out himself. His sleuthing convinces him that his dad is the very conceited publisher Oscar (played in wonderfully sleazy fashion by Amalric).

At times, the film takes on a farcical note. There’s a scene in which Vincent is hiding under the chaise longue as Oscar seduces the secretary on top of the it. He can see the springs moving and her underwear falls only inches from his face.

Green, though, is dealing with very primal subject matter. Vincent is a troubled and suffering youth. At one stage, it looks as if he will slash Oscar's throat. Joseph (Rongione) is Oscar’s estranged brother, a farmer from Normandy who is as sympathetic as Oscar is odious - exactly the father figure Vincent longs for. There are longueurs here but the film has an undeniable quirky charm.