Genesis

'Genesis'

Documentary makers tread through the mud to explore the origins of life with a storyteller.
By Kevin Crust, LA Times Staff Writer

In the beginning, there was muck.

But first, there was darkness, followed by fire, then lots and lots of rain, which caused the muck. And from the muck oozed life, which is when Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou's evocative, meta-nature film, "Genesis," begins to take off.

The film is a follow-up to their successful 1996 documentary, "Microcosmos," in which they focused on an insect-laden patch of grass to render a virtual Jurassic Park of bugs. Minuscule life-and-death struggles played out against blades of grass the size of palm trees when blown up for the big screen.

With "Genesis," the scope is grander with the emphasis definitely on life, or more precisely, its origins.

An African griot (Sotigui Kouyaté) acts as our guide, essentially telling the story of the beginning of everything. Within that muck, which cools from a bubbly, cheese pizza molten state, forms the essential breeding ground for creatures great and small.

Ugly, primeval critters venture to crawl and slither from their watery homes onto what passes for dry land. Gills and fins transform into lungs and feet as evolution occurs before our eyes in the mudskipper, a walking fish, which still strangely roams the Earth.

Exotic animals of unimaginable beauty and grotesqueness, such as frilled lizards, panther chameleons, violin crabs, sea horses and various frogs and toads, make their entry into the world, scrambling for dominance and survival. Very closely, we witness the sex lives of the wet and slimy, as they perform mating rituals that would test the mettle of contestants on both "The Bachelor" and "Fear Factor."

"Genesis" does get around to dealing with death, most impressively in the time-lapse demise of a jellyfish washed up on a beach that makes the sands of time much more than a metaphor.

As extraordinary as all of this imagery is, it is the film's sound design that takes it to another level. A quirky, electric mix of ambient sound, effects and music by composer Bruno Coulais and sound designer Laurent Quaglio gives the film its heart and its sense of humor. The scratching of a crab's claws against rock is amplified to amusing effect. Surprising blurps and bleats turn into symphonic compositions only to revert back to dissonance as the action reaches a crescendo.

"Genesis" is a creationist's nightmare — a feature-length endorsement of evolution. But it does so in an inherently spiritual manner. At times, the life through a microscope plainly blurs the line between man and animal.

The human birth enterprise is woven seamlessly into the film via clips, including a frenzy of spermatozoids and a fetus in a bubble. The underlying effect of this otherworldly parade of biology is the undeniable interconnectedness of it all.

The griot blends myth and fable to stress the bond among all the elements of the universe while simultaneously unraveling a very simple physics mystery. Not strictly speaking a documentary — as many images stand in for unfilmable events such as the dawn of time — "Genesis" takes on profound questions with a clear point of view without being overly didactic.