MEMOIRS OF A PLAGUE (Robert Nugent, Australia). 77 minutes. Rating: NNNN
If you have a thing about bugs, you’ll find the ick factor pretty high in Robert Nugent’s impressionistic look at the relationship between humanity and locusts, which offers enough macro footage of the creatures to rival Microcosmos.
Nugent’s film is less a nature documentary than a philosophical and existential inquiry billed as “a personal journey into the myth of the locust,” it addresses swarms as similar to twisters and floods – essential natural phenomena we haven’t begun to understand and can’t possibly prepare ourselves to battle.
The doc has a dreamlike, dread-laden quality that echoes Peter Weir’s great Australian apocalypse drama The Last Wave, a resemblance that’s surely intentional.
