This is by far the goriest movie I've ever seen. Gore? Yes. Green gore. The film is a sort of garden-variety chainsaw massacre, entirely film at ground level and from the point of view of insects and rodents who haunt a seasonal garden in Cast, Brittany, in Finistère-Sud (France). Indeed when slugs attack the row of new carrots, the leaves fall to the sounds of a roaring chainsaw. Before, when slugs came out of hiding to reach carrots in accelerated-image motion, it was to the sound of a runaway train. This movie is not without humor! It shows us the daily fight between beneficial insects and those that ravage vegetables, fruits and flowers. The beneficial insects benefit from the discrete help of gardeners, a human family--of which we most often only see fingers, hands or feet, as seen from the ground.
The Aublanc-Fiche family wants to kill no creature, whether damage-inducing or not. To fight back, they bring invaders as far away from the garden as possible (taking the risk of leaving the crop-eaters to act on a neighbor's production!) or let them get eaten by their natural predators (which is not direct murder, you see...). We follow the adventures of the apple tree's field mouse, an undesired garden tenant. It's quite tough and can't easily be caught, as it only comes out at night to hunt for a meal. Captured once and brought by the family's son to a prairie far from the garden, the field mouse quickly got back to its old haunts: a few days later it was back in the garden. It wasn't exiled far enough. A second capture will be required--and this time, it travelled by bicycle, to be left three kilometers further!
Potato beetles are harvested by hand on potato leaves, and sent elsewhere (nice for neighbors...), but the farm mom forgets a few larvae, hidden under leaves, and the invasion started anew a few days later. The film tells the story of this permanent fight in the garden to save a harvest from well organized, voracious beings. Will the farmers manage to savor the fruit (and vegetables!) of their labor at the end of the movie? There lies the suspense. Subterranean traps, gooey trenches where slugs pile up and other tricks will allow the gardener to get several ideas-which may not all be 100% efficient, but will allow him to avoid years of guilt for having contributed to the demise of any little being--which feels no such guilt when it damages a human's garden!
The Aublanc-Fiche family wants to kill no creature, whether damage-inducing or not. To fight back, they bring invaders as far away from the garden as possible (taking the risk of leaving the crop-eaters to act on a neighbor's production!) or let them get eaten by their natural predators (which is not direct murder, you see...). We follow the adventures of the apple tree's field mouse, an undesired garden tenant. It's quite tough and can't easily be caught, as it only comes out at night to hunt for a meal. Captured once and brought by the family's son to a prairie far from the garden, the field mouse quickly got back to its old haunts: a few days later it was back in the garden. It wasn't exiled far enough. A second capture will be required--and this time, it travelled by bicycle, to be left three kilometers further!
Potato beetles are harvested by hand on potato leaves, and sent elsewhere (nice for neighbors...), but the farm mom forgets a few larvae, hidden under leaves, and the invasion started anew a few days later. The film tells the story of this permanent fight in the garden to save a harvest from well organized, voracious beings. Will the farmers manage to savor the fruit (and vegetables!) of their labor at the end of the movie? There lies the suspense. Subterranean traps, gooey trenches where slugs pile up and other tricks will allow the gardener to get several ideas-which may not all be 100% efficient, but will allow him to avoid years of guilt for having contributed to the demise of any little being--which feels no such guilt when it damages a human's garden!