It’s funny that so many people are fascinated— perhaps even obsessed— with the notion of looking to the stars to locate life beyond Earth, when 70 percent of our planet is covered with water, the majority of which remains untouched and unseen by humans. That may not be the case for long, however: the alien-like critters who populate the ocean’s inky depths are being threatened by deep-sea mining.
Eleanor Mortimer’s debut documentary feature How Deep is Your Love tackles this pressing environmental crisis through observing a group of biologists exploring this fragile ecosystem. Mortimer— whose friendly and curious narration runs over the film— accompanies them on their journey. Their mission: to collect, examine, and identify the numerous unknown species to better understand the organisms that mining— human greed for these valuable nodules that consist of minerals like cobalt, copper, and nickel and are currently (in what reads like somewhat of a sick joke) primarily in demand to power sources of so-called green energy— is destroying.
The underwater photography captured throughout How Deep is Your Love possesses a delicate beauty that’s impossible not to leave one awe-struck (if anything, the film could have used more of it). Mortimer’s positioning of these close-up shots of funky-shaped, neon-colored creatures— who the scientists affectionately give quirky names like “Barbie Pig” and “Psychedelic Elvis Worm”— against a soft classical score recalls the work of Jean Painlevé, the French documentarian whose films (spanning from 1927 to 1982) specialized in underwater flora and fauna. There’s a playfulness to Painlevé’s work, in which the intermittent voiceover rarely feels like a dry lecture, and the filmmaking exhibits a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor: superimposing footage of seahorses over a racetrack in 1935’s The Seahorse, for example, or juxtaposing real life vampire bats with footage of cinema’s most iconic bloodsuckers in 1945’s The Vampire.
Mortimer’s filmmaking is more straightforward, but she wrings out even more feeling for her marine subjects by concentrating so much on the humans trying to help them. The personalities of the crew— who spend their downtime on the boat doing everything from crocheting to planning a wedding— are endearing, both individually and in their universal affection for the creatures. There’s a tension there that adds another sobering angle to their quest: removing the animals from their highly-pressurized habitats in order to study them kills them. The long-term goal of hopefully helping them requires short-term sacrifice, made all the more difficult by the mayor of the taxonomists’ work (it’s always harder to cut attachments to things once you name them). “I feel a bit like Nicole Kidman’s character in Paddington,” one of them says as he extends the cold metal claw used to collect the creature, referring to the screen villain’s desire to “put that bear in a jar.” It is, as the title suggests, a test of their love.
Mortimer also devotes some time to the International Seabed Authority, who regulate mining activity, and their latest session of negotiations, but bureaucracy largely remains on the back burner. Perhaps How Deep is Your Love, a crowd-pleasing doc as much as it is a clarion call to protect even those things we cannot see, veers too far into whimsy and, by its end, optimism. Admittedly, compared to the doom-and-gloom tone of most contemporary nature documentaries, it’s a breath of fresh air that is nevertheless remarkable effective.
How Deep is Your Love had its world premiere at the True/False Film Festival on February 28. Runtime: 100 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 