Easier to admire than it is to describe, João Pedro Rodrigues’s The Ornithologist (which opens Friday at the Music Box) dances around motifs of faith, death, and transfiguration without quite asserting what it’s all about. The film recognizes its ambiguity, however, and has fun with it, shifting its shape whenever it seems like it’s about to settle on a particular message.
Things soon get more complicated. Kayaking downstream, Fernando gets sucked into a rapid and his boat capsizes. Rather than show the fallout of his accident, Rodrigues cuts unexpectedly to two Chinese women hiking in the woods. The women, we learn, are Fei and Ling, a lesbian couple hiking the Saint James Way. Rodrigues resumes a tranquil tone as he presents them hiking; for a few minutes, it feels as though the opening passages with Fernando never happened. But after a brilliantly edited photomontage that recounts the women’s journey to date, Rodrigues shows the women finding Fernando unconscious by a riverbank. Lin, invoking the words of Saint Anthony, says they should be Good Samaritans and help the stranger, and so they revive him with the help of a first aid kit. Rodrigues presents the revival plainly, declining to make it seem miraculous, foreshadowing later passages where miracles take place without incident.
Fernando becomes more enigmatic as the story proceeds, disposing of his cell phone and burning off his fingerprints. In getting lost, he’s decided to strip himself of his identity altogether. The events of The Ornithologist get more enigmatic too, as Fernando encounters several miracles, Jesus’s doppelganger, and a trio of topless, Latin-speaking huntresses. Rodrigues doesn’t provide many clues as to what this all means. Regardless, his journey is a transfixing experience, as Rodrigues’s narrative curveballs and vivid depiction of nature seduce the viewer into a world where anything seems possible. If nothing else, the film reminds one of how strange and beautiful existence can be.
