When we think of an ice desert, we easily visualize the Arctic ice cap, polar bears or the vast expanses of the Antarctic continent, with its share of emperor penguins and orcas, intelligent and hungry predators. We imagine less… pink flamingos, their feathers weighted with frost, trapped in a frozen lake at an altitude of 4,000 meters in the Andes, in South America; or a mother helmeted chameleon, paralyzed by morning frost, on the summit of Mount Kenya (5,199 meters), in Africa.

These are two of the astonishing sequences to discover in the film which introduces the evening that France 2 dedicates to animal documentaries, and happily renews the genre.

Cruel nature

So, when we think of an animal film, we expect touching images of a giant panda, cute, chewing bamboo. They appear well here, like those – among others – magnificent and funny of a Pallas’s cat chasing the vole in the snow-covered Gobi Desert. But they are also accompanied by scenes which remind us that nature is cruel. Starting with the first filmed confrontation between a pack of orcas and a sea leopard (marine mammal). Later, the logic of the food chain will reverse the roles, with a school of leopards attacking young penguins. In the commentary, Lambert Wilson accentuates the dramaturgy.

The actor also knows how to use humor to describe a fight between two male petrels, “who fight with vomit”, or to comment, in the Japanese Alps, on the bathing of two macaques in hot springs. But, as soon as the temperature hits minus 20 degrees, “only solidarity makes the difference”: alone, the macaque dies; entwined together, they survive.

The landscapes themselves are surprising, particularly during the flight over Mount Erebus, in Antarctica, one of the seven volcanoes on the planet to shelter a permanent lava lake. The last minutes of the film address the dangers of global warming, both for animals and for humans. The theme is developed in the second documentary, A World in Upheaval, which follows the work of scientists at the poles and in glacial zones, with varying degrees of success. If they manage to chip a young seal in the Bay of St. Lawrence, in Canada, they feel helpless – and the viewers with them – in the face of the hundreds of young Adélie land penguins, who are freezing to death before their eyes, their down, made to protect them from the cold, not being rainproof.

“All of these processes are reversible,” says Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. But we will have to change our societies in depth. It won’t be easy, but it is doable. »