The Circle of Snows on Netflix: what is Juan Antonio Bayona’s drama about the famous crash worth? (critical)

The Hollywoodized Spanish filmmaker returns to his mother tongue for a prodigious rereading of a news story dating from 1972, seventy days of limited survival after a plane crash in the Andes.

THE seventies in Uruguay. Kids from Montevideo, sports, bourgeois, Catholic, young – especially young. A few shots capture them on a rugby field, then in the locker rooms, in a café, in an airport, in the cabin of the plane which will take them to Santiago, Chile for their next match. The exhibition lasts from Snow Circle lasts about ten minutes, ten minutes which do not really allow us to identify them, just to sketch a group portrait and give a general impression.

Everything then goes even faster: damage, crash, terrible explosion, the plane cut in two, one half breaking away, the other brutally blown away by the devastating shock of depressurization. The drama unfolds in a flash, then everything stops abruptly. The silence. Snow, all around, everywhere. Majestic mountains that block the sun half the day. Nights at -20°, cracked lips, open wounds that become infected, necrotic, fever, frozen bodies, a completely different portrait of the same group, a completely different general impression. And hunger.

The news item is known, even famous, throughout the world. There have been books, films, documentaries, articles, and a persistent echo in the collective unconscious. “Oh yes, the cannibal rugby team, right?“If we want, yes. But also something completely different. There are two forms of survival, those who exalt humanity and those who emphasize its limits. Those who celebrate the resilience of his spirit and those who reduce it to his instincts.

The simple hypothesis of anthropophagy immediately falls into the horrifying camp, man reduced to the rank of beast, survival at a high price, at the cost of the loss of that which founds his Humanity. The whole project of this film (and before it of the book by Pablo Vierci from which it is adapted) is to overturn this certainty.

In this story, at least in this version of this story, no part is left to instinct. The group organizes itself, becomes a “society” (original title: The Snow Society), chooses to overcome its own taboos by making its survival sacred, which no longer becomes an animal reflex but a spiritual issue.

Where any group film must theoretically make each of its members exist, Bayona on the contrary strives to make them indistinguishable, faces as well as names or personalities. Everyone blends into the whole, into the all, death becomes a tribute, a sacrifice, the accession to a global consciousness.

The Snow Circle succeeds in this inversion of perspective by its staging of the collective (all of humanity?) as the real main character. The religious themes (Life, Death, Sacrifice, Holiness, Resurrection) are thus reformulated in a secular holistic version, the body of Man in place of the body of Christ, in an approach which could be blasphemous if it were not also deeply, painfully, viscerally compassionate.

The Snow Circle. By Juan Antonio Bayona. With Enzo Vogrincic Roldán, Simón Hempe, Rafael Federman… Duration 2h24. Available January 4 on Netflix.