What’s your earliest memory of the
“King of Beasts?” In my case I’m three and my mom takes me to Madison Square
Garden to see Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. This magical day is
shadowed by my witnessing a slightly older boy hit by a truck near the Garden –
from the beginning I conflate wild animals and human mortality. The one thing
that doesn’t snap into place is the idea that these wondrous creatures hail
from a truly wild place, that’s the downside of doing your lion watching at the
Bronx Zoo, observing the five beasts who served as the official MGM logo, and don’t
forget faint of heart Burt Lahr in Oz.
Filmmakers Dereck and Beverly
Joubert cheerfully demolish every misconception I had about lions in the wild
in the course of a riveting tale of a lioness determined to save her three cubs
from the bad intentions of a rival pride or the razor sharp horns of a herd of
wild buffalo. Set in a heartbreakingly beautiful slice of Botswana’s Okavango
Delta The Last Lions (opening Friday at Bay Area Landmark Theaters)
makes clear that the lions’ place in the African food chain is nowhere near
secure – in the past fifty years the world lion population has plummeted from
close to half a million to barely twenty thousand: the invasion of the lions’
turf by humans being the major problem.
There are no human critters on view
in the Jouberts’ tooth and claw saga, although the off-screen narrator informs
us that our heroine, Ma di Tau (“Mother of Lions”) must not take her cubs too
far north or risk human retaliation. From the get go our cat has a devil of a
survival problem: her mate has been seriously wounded in a inter-pride showdown
and now she must flee the rival cats if her three cubs stand any chance of
reaching adulthood. One of The Last Lions’ strong suits is how
harrowingly clear our lioness’s options really are: in the end she clings to a
small niche on a tiny island, wrapped around a crocodile-infested river – the
crocs, incidentally, are one band of predators the lions steer clear of.
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The filmmakers – who have invested
thousands of hours tracking these rival prides – vividly convey just how
perilous it is for the lioness to hunt the only practical local food supply:
buffalo meat. These beasts are frightfully good at using the lions’ own tactics
against them – the two creatures act a little like rival guerrilla armies in a
never ending series of deadly skirmishes.
Although some doc purists may find
the narration intrusive and prone to attribute too many human like traits to
the lions, the filmmakers employ stunning close-ups (sometimes getting a little
too close for my comfort to some pretty ferocious kills) to keep the inevitable
upbeat outcome from seeming at all inevitable or even possible. Ma di Tau in
the end pulls off a true adventure coup that involves winning over the
affections of a deadly rival pride while in the process saving a precious drop
of her own DNA.
Employing the best of the
techniques developed by Disney’s pioneering wildlife photographers, while
avoiding the overly cutesy falsifying of the animals’ true natures and survival
dilemmas, The Last Lions is a fascinating simulated safari for those of
us unable to ever afford the real thing. Watching the movie on my big screen I
had an only for queer boys’ kind of déjà vu moment: I remember doing a bed
scene with a cute naked boy actor at the old Studio Rhino. Halfway through the
run of this play about human wild things on Gotham’s 42nd Street, my
acting partner left my arms to accompany his dad on an African safari. The
Last Lions – with its modified disclaimer explaining that the filmmakers
were not themselves responsible for any of on-screen carnage – is probably the
best out of bed wild life adventure you’ll be invited to this week.