A few years ago the novelist Paul Auster wrote a riveting short piece about a true experience from his childhood: At age 14, during a summer camp hike, his group was caught in a terrible storm and a boy right next to Auster was killed by a lightning strike.
If you’re going to make a documentary about people struck by lightning, you want this Auster story in it — which is why “Act of God” starts out right.
The first voice we hear is Auster’s, describing the way this incident had a profound effect on his life; at the end of the movie, he returns to read the story itself.
“Act of God” is an idiosyncratic film by the team of Jennifer Baichwal (director) and Nick de Pencier (cinematographer). Their previous film, “Manufactured Landscapes,” was a beautifully shot study of the environmental photographer Edward Burtynsky.
This new film also emphasizes the wild, violent beauty of its subject. Interviews with people whose lives have been affected by lightning strikes are punctuated by de Pencier’s lush footage of storms (as well as a few raw You Tube videos of sudden electrical tempests).
One man describes being in a group that was hit by a bolt; all were knocked out, but only one person died. In France, a lightning obsessive talks about why he opened a museum devoted to the effects of lightning strikes.
Many of the testimonials come around to a common question: how to make sense of a bolt-from-the-blue occurrence.
One man has turned his survival from a strike into a career as a religious self-help guru. Others reject any meaning to the incidents.
In Mexico, the filmmakers visit with families affected when children were killed by lightning while visiting a holy cross at the top of the village hill.
“God does not make mistakes,” one mother says, while trying to make sense of her daughter’s random death.
This is the movie’s quiet subtext: Is everything random or is there some kind of meaning? What’s the meaning of surviving a storm that kills the person standing next to you?
“Act of God” is well on the way to creating a memorable movie of this, yet at 75 minutes it pulls up short of full development.
Somehow I wanted more voices heard from and more about the sheer weirdness of surviving an event that we use as the ultimate metaphor for chance. “Act of God” engages this subject, but doesn’t quite cover it.
“Act of God” ½
Documentary look at people who have been struck by lightning and how such a random event altered their lives. The most notable (and arresting) figure is novelist Paul Auster, whose childhood story about a lightning strike is riveting; the rest of the film is a visually beautiful piece that doesn’t quite go far enough with its subject.
Rated: Not rated, probably PG for subject matter
Showing: SIFF Cinema
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