The circle of snow by Juan Antonio Bayona (French version of The snow society), in the running for the Oscar for best foreign film, was so popular on Netflix that the platform has just added a short behind-the-scenes documentary on filming entitled Who were we in the mountain?
It’s already one of my films of the year. It must be said that I have been obsessed for 30 years by this true story of Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya flight 571 which crashed in the Andes mountain range in 1972, which I discovered through the film Alive, by Frank Marshall, in 1993, like many North Americans. In the Spanish-speaking world, it is a mythical story, which has been called “The Miracle of the Andes”, and The circle of snow is an event film, which brings together a cast of carefully selected young unknown actors, as well as real survivors of the disaster in extra roles, who have given their consent to the project.
Out of 45 passengers, only 16 survived the accident, the cold, the avalanches, and starvation — truly nothing was spared them during the 72 days they spent on the mountain. To do this, they had to eat the frozen corpses of their companions in misfortune.
They had no choice but to go beyond one of the greatest human taboos to escape, by making a collective pact: if one of them died, he gave permission to the others to eat his body. .
We understand why this case has inspired books, documentaries and films for 50 years. “The fact that the subject comes up again is never a coincidence,” notes anthropologist Luce Des Aulniers, with whom I spoke for an hour about cannibalism, which deserves a separate column. “What collective sensitivity does this correspond to, what must we give up to survive?”, she asks.
I am not a fan of extreme exploits, when human beings voluntarily defy nature. On the other hand, I admire people who have survived extreme situations for which they were not at all prepared, who had to look within themselves, despite themselves, for something that they did not even suspect. This is the case with Flight 571, which had on board mainly young rugby players on their way, they believed, to a match in Chile. We can only identify with them, and ask ourselves: what would I have done in their place?
I initially feared that Bayona’s film would be just an ordinary remake of Marshall’s film, but, on the contrary, it is a reappropriation, much more accomplished, and in Spanish, of this drama which had toured the world, and which a new generation is discovering, as stunned as I must have been. to be in 1993 by an American film which was not without qualities, but much less incarnatedIf I may.
The director makes us feel the terrible effects of the famine, the incredible courage that these people must have had. He also shot footage at the exact location where the survivors were trapped and impossible to spot, in a completely hostile yet breathtakingly beautiful environment. A wise choice, because we cannot understand the situation if we do not understand the environment, where there is not even a piece of grass to graze.
Bayona closely follows the timeline of events, and I was surprised how hunger and its ravages arrive much more quickly than I expected. In less than ten days, the survivors’ urine turns black, they understand very well that they will die if they do not feed. What also traumatized me was that they must have eaten a lot more human flesh than Marshall’s film suggested. This tragedy marked people’s minds mainly for this reason, the Catholic Church even had to comment at the time on this rare case which led to cannibalism. Because not only did these people live through a nightmare, but they also had to face public opinion when they came back from the dead.
Don’t think that The circle of snow is a depressing film. I rather find that it is a luminous film, which gives faith in humanity. We are not here in Hannibal Lecter who drinks his neighbor with a glass of chianti, which is pathology, nor in the novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy where hungry hordes hunt and kill humans so that their gang can eat.
The circle of snow upsets us by showing this solidarity between the survivors and this pact which offends their convictions, not only religious, but fundamental.
They didn’t JUST eat human flesh to survive, they had to share it equally. Fernando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, the two heroes who, weakened after two months in the mountains, set out to seek help on foot, received from everyone a ration commensurate with the mission which seemed impossible. They succeeded after 10 days, and saved their friends.
According to Luce Des Aulniers, the subject of cannibalism is profound, taboo in all societies, but almost everywhere in our vocabulary and our imagination, therefore inexhaustible. There is a taboo of language, she says, when there is “a survivalist breach of a universal code of ethics like this.” We do not eat “meat” or “corpse”, but “flesh” taken from the “bodies” of these unfortunate companions, moreover with extreme resistance. The anthropologist Louis-Vincent Thomas described this uniquely rational and operational, desymbolizing outcome as “cannibalism of shortage”, which remains extremely rare. »
In our speeches, we are being “eaten” by the rich, part of the planet eats up resources while a larger part does not have enough to eat, we fear being “swallowed” by immigration, being “devoured” by artificial intelligence, and many other things.
Luce Des Aulniers then quotes the sociologist Jean Ziegler who said that “capitalism has created a cannibalistic order of the world”. Maybe that’s why The circle of snow talk to us…