In the overexploited and somewhat purring genre of animal documentary, Anne and Erik Lapied offer a remarkable vintage. They filmed an entire year in the life of a family of foxes in the rocky chaos of a mountain in the Italian Alps. The result, aesthetically superb, is a spare and poetic chronicle of wildlife, in which the viewer immerses himself in the hectic daily life of this modest predator. Modest because the fox has the disadvantage of being located in the soft underbelly of the animal kingdom: between two links in the food chain, it is too light to covet large-scale prey and fleshy enough to be chewed by a host of nearby neighbors. furry and feathered.
Every year, 500,000 of them fall under the bullets of hunters
In addition to the limitless hostility shown to it by the human species (every year, 500,000 of them, considered harmful, fall under the bullets of hunters), the golden eagle regularly makes its four-o’clock, as well as the wolf, six times heavier and muscular than him. Added to this intermediate status is the ruthless complexity that governs fox society. The film first focuses on those living as part of a community, led by a dominant couple, which takes as much from Shakespeare as from Orwell. The right of residence is regularly called into question in the name of the law of the strongest and the regulation of the group.
This must not exceed a defined number of individuals under penalty of forced marginalization – the slightly fragile “Tanguy”, like this puny female that her brothers and sisters marginalize from the cradle, are quickly asked to make a place beyond the common den. These subjects then lead a solitary and wandering existence (the mountain is large, but squared in a network of private properties, relentlessly defended) which reduces their life expectancy, which is already meager compared to domesticated cases, by the same amount – on average a fox does not lives less than five years in the wild, while tamed it can reach two decades.
Saturday December 24 at 8:55 p.m. on Arte. Documentary by Anne and Erik Lapied (2022). 1h30. (Available in replay until February 21, 2023 on Arte.tv).
