Life on and around the North Pole gets the March of the Penguins treatment in the new French documentary La planète blanche (The White Planet). Directors Thierry Piantanida and Thierry Ragobert were in pre-production on this Franco-Canadian film before Penguins became the talk of the town, but their documentary is nevertheless similar on a technical level, even if its narrative approach is vastly different. Instead of a tight focus on a talking-head penguin family of three, the two Thierrys present us with a cast of Altmanesque proportions, with one or more representative of most polar species getting their brief – too brief – moment under the sun. Real-life Pole explorer Jean-Louis Étienne is the narrator of the original French version.

Some of the film’s more exciting shots, including an inside view of a mother polar bear’s breeding nest and the escape of a seal from a predator through a set of tunnels through the ice, feel awfully contrived because they clearly suggest the filmmakers’ presence, even if they do not appear on camera. The nagging question that plagues these otherwise awesome shots is a constant “how did they get the camera up- or down there?”. A similar problem arises with the various scenes in which a predator hunts a potential prey. Ragobert and Piantanida carefully cut between the hunter and the hunted, borrowing their editing techniques from the world of feature fiction. This results in an apparent undermining of their truthfulness as filmmakers who try to document the moments as they unspool in real life, since these scenes seem carefully choreographed rather than shot in the wild. As in the recent French hit documentary Le dernièr trappeur (The Last Trapper), this feels so contrived that it actually takes the viewer out of the film.