E-Mail This Article to a Friend LA MARCHE DE L’EMPEREUR/MARCH OF THE PENGUINS

The emperor penguin waddles forth as an exemplar of family values in first-time director Luc Jacquet’s quiet, engrossing documentary. Each spring, the Antarctic birds shuffle 70 miles to begin their mating ritual, and soon the trumpeting mob are dancing beak to beak. As kinky as it sounds, the penguin sex scene is weirdly sensual; it’s also one of the few times, and appropriately so, that otherwise eloquent narrator Morgan Freeman keeps mum. From here, the stakes rise, as the males egg-sit, the females leave to feed, and the temperature dips to 80 below. It’s a tedious life, and that shows in the film’s pacing. Still, there are arresting visuals, from the sculptural, blue-glossed glaciers to the snow-dusted mass of penguin patres familias, and images of toddling chicks balance out the darker moments. (Freeman tells us that some penguins "disappear," but we know those frozen babies aren’t sleeping.) As French avian documentaries go, Jacques Perrin’s Le peuple migrateur/Winged Migration has the aerial footage, but the emperors’ flightlessness doesn’t ground their story. On the contrary, this saga of survival often soars.