Gunda is an interesting movie. The central figure of the film is Gunda, a female pig who, as the movie begins, has just given birth to a litter of babies. Over the ninety minutes of the film, we just watch as the babies grow and Gunda mothers them. I know what you’re thinking; that doesn’t sound like enough for a feature length film. Well, you’re right, that’s not actually all there is to this movie. Because, yeah, that would be ridiculous. The movie also spends time watching a herd of cows and a one-legged chicken.
You can probably tell from that description that this is a very minimalist film. And it’s even more minimalist than you realize. It’s filmed in stark, but very sharp, black & white. There’s not a single note of music in the film nor a single spoken word. We never see a human or hear a human’s voice. The cameras are still most of the time; we’re just watching the existence of these animals happen in front of us. And what we end up with an incredibly immersive movie, if you have the patience for it. The sound design is pretty amazing; it captures just the ambience of nature in a really beautiful way, from the wind rustling in the leaves to the hay crunching under the weight of Gunda as she noses her piglets out of the way in order to take a nap. A scene in a thunderstorm is particularly wonderful in terms of the sound making you feel like you’re right there with these animals.
I’m not going to say it’s a perfect movie. I have to say that the several minute sequence with the one-legged chicken really didn’t work that well for me. I have to say that pigs and cows are not the most expressive creatures on the planet, but they’re Marlon Brando compared to chickens, if you know what I mean. I would have probably excised the chicken section; the cow section is fine though. It is kind of nice to get something to break up the lengthy sections of the film with Gunda, but I think maybe just have the cow section of the movie right in the middle instead of having the chicken and cow sections dividing the Gunda material into thirds. This is getting pretty inside baseball, I guess.
But I really did love this movie at the end of the day. I, in fact, watched it twice. I found the immersive moment to moment experience of it to be blood-slowing, peaceful and meditative. But Kosakovskiy is up to something here as well that I don’t want to talk about too much because it’s kind of a moment you should experience for yourself. But the long and short of it is that Kosakovskiy wants to take away from his audience the usual excuses that we use when we come out of nature/animal documentaries. It’s easy to kind of handwave the idea that these animals have any sort of consciousness or emotions by saying things like, “Well, of course it LOOKED like that animal was feeling an emotion because of the sad music they put on the soundtrack.” At the end of this film, Kosakovskiy wants to essentially throw up his hands and tell us that we can’t blame him for the way we feel and what we think when we get to that final shot. This movie is essentially saying that, look, it has nothing up its sleeve; so, if you feel or think that the animals in this movie, in particular Gunda herself, is feeling something akin to emotion at the end of this movie, then that’s on you. You get to go decide what you think about that. But the usual excuses don’t work. There’s no sad music, there are no lovingly edited montages. I think probably what Kosakovskiy would say, and I haven’t read any interviews with him or anything, so this is just my opinion, but I think what he would say is that the way you as a viewer feel at the end of this movie is . . . well, not a trick. And, while I could get very meta and talk about how every documentary is a curated experience, I have to say that in the moment of this movie, I agree with him. Just to even make a film like this, this minimal and quiet and slow, and have it work moment to moment is really amazing. That it actually leaves the viewer with much to think about is even more astonishing. I can’t say Gunda is “quite a trick,” which is what I often say about movies that execute a high concept extremely. So I’ll say it’s quite an achievement. An achievement of art, of beauty, of emotion. Very quietly and with no overt playing to the camera, Gunda gets into your heart; Gunda the pig, I mean, not Gunda the movie, though I suppose that’s true as well. It’s a film that I felt some trepidation about and you probably do too. You’re probably afraid it’ll just be dull or you’ll be bored; and you might be. But you might not. And if you can get on the movie’s wavelength, trust me, it’ll be a long, long time before you forget this particular pig. 4 stars.
tl;dr – immersive, incredibly minimal documentary depicts a sow and her new litter in beautiful black & white with not a note of music or a single spoken word to distract; a cinematic experience. 4 stars.