A beautiful, sober look at ‘Seasons'

The exceedingly pretty documentary “Seasons” comes from filmmakers Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the two-Jacques act behind “Oceans” and, earlier, their most dazzling work to date, “Winged Migration.”

With “Seasons” they go long, and wide, if not necessarily deep. In the words of the co-directors, the film covers “20,000 years of the history of Europe's wild animals.” They create an impressionistic, largely narration-free picture of the post-ice age heyday of Europe's vast and teeming forests, and how humankind messed it up in unbalancing the ecological balancing act that is planet Earth.

Beasts of all varieties and sizes scamper and slink, gallop and play, fight and reproduce for the movie's crew of sharpshooting cinematographers. The images are gobsmackingly gorgeous, the animals so close we can see the ripple of muscle in a wild horse's flank. “Planet Earth” might have made us tougher to impress, but “Seasons” has the advantage of its focus on a timeline, showing the gradual incursion of man into this earthly paradise.

The result impresses and frustrates in roughly equal measure. Example: Early on we see footage, discreet on the verge of being Victorian, of the birth of a fawn. It's just a footnote in the overall 95-minute film, a stunning and beautiful one. But who needs adorable reaction shots of the other critters in the vicinity, plus a gooey harp line on the soundtrack? Not me. I just the need the fawn.

Narrator Jacques Perrin orients us at the beginning. We are witnesses to the great thaw after an 80,000-year winter. The “Golden Age” of the forest commences. Wolves, lynx, bison, stags, bears, bear cubs, birds of every species, bugs of every species being fed to birds of every species: The food chain here really is something to see. “Seasons” brings to mind Woody Allen's line from “Annie Hall” about nature being “an enormous restaurant,” or Bertolt Brecht's “Threepenny Opera” credo: “First comes a full stomach, then comes ethics.”

But mostly, “Seasons” creates an idealized, geography-nonspecific forest for its panoramic morality play. The ethical issues here matter little to the fauna; they're implicitly tied to the hunter-gatherers who come along after a while, bringing with them progress of a sort, and destruction of another.

The footage was shot over several years in France, Poland, Norway, Romania, Scotland and Italy and other locales, chasing the seasons.

Periodically “Seasons” drops a fact or two in our laps, such as a bit of clear-cutting trivia (3,000 oak trees were needed for a single ship in “the royal fleet”).

Beginning in edenic tranquillity and ending in death and destruction, the mesmeric “Seasons” doesn't make you feel particularly proud to be human.