Reseñas de la crítica

This short documentary by Italian filmmaker Yuri Ancarani recalls some of Werner Herzog's nonfiction work (La Soufrière, Lessons of Darkness) in that its subject matter feels almost secondary to its painterly imagery and philosophical mood. . . . This milieu might seem exotic in any case, but here it seems like something from a different planet; that Ancarai shows greater sympathy for animals than people only heightens the antihumanist vibe.

Lynch found a good use for drones in Twin Peaks, while The Challenge — a droll portrait of extremely wealthy Qataris frittering away their time by pursuing the surprisingly expensive sport of competitive falconry — similarly used GoPros to excellent ends by strapping them to the heads of birds performing extremely vertiginous flights. Not quite Leviathan, but fairly close to temporarily experiencing what it's like to be non-human.

Images—presented without any explanatory titles or guiding narrative—are our primary guide to an ultra-elite world of privilege in the middle of the desert. There's not much to distinguish the film's exquisitely composed, opulent visions of the Middle East (shot by Jonathan Ricquebourg, Ancarani, and Luca Nervegna) from the images of flagrant excess you'd find in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog or a sleek, high-end fashion brand video circa 2008.

This world of masculine contests and showmanship, lavish displays of power and prowess, perpetually flirts with the chaos of nature unleashed.

It took a while to register with me that The Challenge is in fact a documentary, albeit a very peculiar one. The elegance of Jonathan Ricquebourg's photography, which constantly emphasizes the strangeness of what we're seeing—both through enhanced richness of color and through manifestly crafted compositions—suggests video art rather than documentary of any conventional kind.

A mystifying series of coy and curious impressions, The Challenge is also undeniably playful in its observation of collective and unseen preening. There's an inherent absurdity in something like a lone TV screen in the middle of a sandy wasteland, and a more constructed kind, when a long take of a room filled with hundreds of swooping birds is accompanied by a bellicose pan flute-enhanced EDM music reaches the grandeur—and terror—of a classic movie epic.

Despite all the feathery swooping and gunning motors, the flashing gold and pounding sun, these immaculately framed, balanced and photographed images have a tableaulike quality, characterized by a stillness (perhaps cultural or situational) that suggests a memento mori.

The sheikhs chart upscale private jets outfitted with custom falcon seating, drive immaculate Ferraris through the desert next to well-behaved cheetahs, race (and gloriously flip) luxury SUVs in and around roadless sand dunes, and, of course, buy, trade, care for, and flaunt their killer birds. Ah, and did I mention the falcons wear GoPros? This is, needless to say, an original film. It is also wildly delightful.

Ancarani crafts a mise-en-scène so exuberant that the film becomes, at times, an unapologetic exercise in stylistic abstraction akin to the sand-and-light formations of Nathaniel Dorsky's seminal experimental film Alaya.

Art documentary The Challenge may be aptly named as a dramatically-structured piece, but there's an exquisite visual luxury at play in this loose trip across the Arabian gulf to a falconry competition in Qatar.

Ancarani's film doesn't so much revel in the sheikh's comical excesses as it carefully trains its focus on these men for whom money is basically no object, at work and at rest, with hobbies and chores dissolving into a single stream of exactingly chronicled play. Perhaps what's most striking about The Challenge is how it forwards an image of men committed to being together and individually pursuing their idiosyncratic, gaudy desires, regardless of the price tag—Hawksian, almost!

It excels in tapping the particularly uncanny sensation of a blinded bird perched inside of an aircraft mid-flight. Ancarani's strain of desert anthropology depersonalizes its subjects at the expense of a universalizing view, the timelessness of the landscape belittling the endeavours of men. The film baits the mythic with the mundane.