Added to a very understandable attack of national pride (devouring a hit from Netflix, excellently directed by a Barcelona filmmaker and with a technical sheet full of Catalan surnames), the success of La sociedad de la nieve is explained by the method with which Bayona has converted Pablo Vierci's original book into a film where survival has no epic quality whatsoever and rather nothing to do with heroism. Unlike Frank Marshall's grimy film Alive –shot in 1993, in times of capitalist Olympism and when self made man and Young but amply prepared marked the agenda of the Western imagination– Bayona has exercised the skill of explaining the famous accident of flight 571 in the Andes against the backdrop of a world where everyone has already calmly accepted that, in order to survive, sooner or later one will have to devour some companion until only their bones remain.
La sociedad de la nieve digests normalized (but at the same time traumatic) aspects of our existence such as the influence of chance in the development of life, the impossibility of having a peaceful relationship with a nature as beautiful as it is hostile, the atheism according to which faith is not worth a damn when even divinity forgets your own existence and, it must be insisted upon, the slap in the face that comes with accepting that in this world you will be forced to literally digest otherness in order to move forward. There is a detail that may go unnoticed by the viewer of this magnificent film, and that is how Bayona has converted the survival cannibalism of the Old Christians Club rugby team into a practically eucharistic ritual (it is not necessary to be a genius of Christian iconography to see how the players, as they secure their lives, acquire the bodily form and the prototypical wounds of Jesus Christ).
Far from provoking fear or sugary admiration, the misfortune suffered by these young people has deeply struck us because –who knows if unconsciously– the screenwriters of the film Society of the Snow have wanted to highlight how happiness can also arise in the most radical isolation and in an environment where nature expresses itself in an arbitrarily violent way. Living in the society of the snow is accepting a Darwinism that sooner or later will eliminate the brains least adaptable to pain (the dead are dispatched with a simple typography; the living will be immortal becoming icons through an image) and even feeling some envy for those moments of perfect communal solitude in a still virgin landscape, without any contamination. Any accident is a misfortune, but nowadays it would be interesting to devise a survey asking if any of us would pay to get on that plane.
Living in the society of the snow is accepting a Darwinism that sooner or later will eliminate the brains least adaptable to painBayona exploits very well this mixture of repulsion and envy for the survivors, and radicalizes the contemporaneity of this film in the final scenes of the footage, when –aware that they will be freed shortly– the rugby players begin to make themselves selfies and they brighten their mane, knowing perfectly well that they have started a stardom notoriously adaptable within the new world of mass entertainment. The ability to survive, at the limit, is no longer linked to the strength of a group to stay together, but to the post-traumatic acceptance of individuals aware of having become a marketable story. In this sense, I dare to think that –in my imaginary survey– many citizens of the world would not hesitate to get back on the 571 to have even the slightest chance of going down in history, even if it ended up involving burying a sister or eating some fraternal liver.
Bayona has given birth, in this sense, to a very suitable contemporary art product. If Spielberg had filmed it, it would, of course, already be a clear favorite to take home a good handful of statuettes. But being born in Barcelona still doesn't count as much as the Jewish patina. And yet, when it comes to surviving and eating each other to get ahead, we are probably the tribe that treasures the most knowledge in the whole world.