Review of La cinquième saison

'The Fifth Season' is an intensely arty film that follows a year in the life of a Belgian village when it is struck by a strange malady: cows stop giving milk, cultivated seeds stop sprouting, bees stop making honey, etc. Given the size of some of the villagers they're clearly not starving, but predictably enough fingers of suspicion soon start pointing and it all gets a bit 'Wicker Man' in the end. I wouldn't want to sit through it again, but it was undoubtedly interesting to watch once. I only hope, though, that the fish seen suffocating on a river bank, and the freshly-decapitated chicken on a kitchen table, were used for food afterwards and not simply abused for the film: art alone is not worth that kind of suffering.