These days, U-certificated celluloid is hard to come by. As the school holidays drag on, the local multiplex offers all too little succour to harassed mums desperate for something to do with their broods on rainy afternoons. To them, The Fox and the Child must look like a godsend indeed.
Here be no naughty words, scantily-clad trollops or grinning posthumous Oscar candidates menacingly extolling knife crime. A freckly little girl makes friends with a foxy-woxy, amidst fairytale Eurocountryside. Oh, how happily they play together, for what seems like more than a lifetime. Eventually, however, a moral surfaces. As long as Beauty confines herself to merely toying with the Beast's savage affections, all is well. But, once she (literally) hugs it to her bosom and (literally) invites it into her bedroom, chaos breaks out, and near-tragedy ensues. Wildness, it seems, is to be respected, but kept at arm's length, where its disruptive potential can be contained.
What could be more harmless and improving, or more politically and parentally correct? Mums will doubtless regard this film as a reliably sensible homily, just as its director Luc Jacquet's previous wildlife parable, The March of the Penguins, was widely interpreted as a paean to family values. That film became a huge box-office hit, perhaps partly because of its supposedly reassuring message. Now, its successor is busily accumulating comparable pay dirt in cinemas across Europe.
So, is Jacquet merely co-opting nature to promote bourgeois ideology, and coining it in the process? The answer isn't as obvious as it may seem. Certainly, the official message of The Fox and the Child could hardly be more explicit. The story, such as it is, is narrated by the girl's grown-up self. In the English-language version, it's an unseen Kate Winslet who reproaches her junior analogue for the folly of her childish ways. Yet Kate's dreary, repetitive drone could hardly be less persuasive.
On the other hand, the film's cinematography (in the hands of Eric Dumage and Gérard Simon) is utterly compelling, and conveys a very different message. If you've seen wildness embraced by the camera with more impassioned and infectious enthusiasm, please let me know where. Every creature encountered, from ravening wolf and lumbering bear to flitting nuthatch and skittering butterfly, radiates star quality. The fox itself, sinuous, lustrous and numinously soulful amidst ever-ravishing surroundings, casts an inescapable spell.
We Brits fancy ourselves at filming wildlife, but we have plenty to learn from the French. Dumage and Simon don't just get animals to plod through their paces while being taxonomised and patronised in preachy Attenboroughese. They take us right into the dark heart of the bestial world, to live and feel its denizens' every pant and tremor, just as Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou did in Microcosmos.
Unsurprisingly, total immersion in the magic of wildness fails to foster the restraint of dangerous urges. Rather, it inspires yearning for surrender to the untamed. Whatever Jacquet may or may not have intended, it's his heroine's submission to the call of the wild that his film actually celebrates, not her grown-up self's wearisome advocacy of prudence.
The girl's adventure recalls not so much Disney kiddie-pap as other, more lascivious evocations of girl/animal encounters, such as Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves. Jacquet's 'child' is rather older than you might expect. She's a prepubescent ten-year-old, not a latency-period infant. Her heart "beats flat-out" when she happens upon the vulpine object of her burgeoning desire. There's thus a coming-of-age edge to her encounter with the wilder side of nature and the human soul. Walkabout, which also deploys a reflective older self, comes to mind.
Parents eager to protect and protract the innocence of their offspring rightly fear the big screen's baleful influence. Unfortunately for them, its call to sensuality, danger and rebellion can lurk even behind a U certificate. If you don't want your little ones shaken or stirred, perhaps you'd be better off taking them to The Dark Knight than The Fox and the Child. The Joker is merely fantastical, but youthful infatuation with the unbridled is real indeed.