36 | New Scientist | 6 November 2021
Views Culture
The film column
SOMETHING has gone wrong in
Mendel’s life. Bob, his boss at a
genetics laboratory in New York
City, is holding up a journal for
his young post-doc to see. On the
cover is a close-up of the wing
of a monarch butterfly and a
cover-line announcing the
lab’s breakthrough: they have
shown how the evolution and
development of butterfly colour
and iridescence are controlled by
a single master regulatory gene.
“This is you. Own it,” says Bob
(William Mapother). But Mendel
(Tenoch Huerta, familiar from
the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico)
is close to tears.
Mendel is a man trapped
between worlds who is no more
comfortable in the lab than in the
butterfly forests of Michoacán,
Mexico, where he grew up.
Bit by bit, through touching
flashbacks, some disposable
dream sequences and one rather
overwrought row, we learn the
reasons why. We see how, when
Mendel and his brother Simon
were children, a mining accident
drowned their parents; how their
grandmother took them in, butthings were never the same;
how Simon went to work for
the company responsible for the
accident, and has ever since felt
judged by his high-flying, science-
whizz, citizen-of-nowhere brother.
When Son of Monarchs
premiered at this year’s Sundance
Film Festival, critics picked up
on its themes of borders andbelonging, the harm walls
do and the ways nature
undermines them.
Mendel grew up in a forest
alive with clouds of monarch
butterflies. Sarah, his New York
girlfriend (Alexia Rasmussen;
note-perfect but somewhat under-
used), is an amateur trapeze artist.
The point – that flying creatures
know no frontiers – is clear.
To underline this, a flashback
shows Mendel and Simon in
happier days, imagining a timeButterflies without borders Son of Monarchs is a beautiful film that explores
themes of inspiration and belonging through the eyes of a brilliant young scientist
with a tragic backstory, says Simon Ings“ This film isn’t about
scientific findings, but
science as a vocation
and how to relight the
spark of curiosity”when humans have evolved wings.
In a more scripted film, such
gestures would have been heavy-
handed. Here, though, they are
pretty much all the viewer has
to go on in what is sometimes
a painfully indirect film.
The plot does come together
through the character of Mendel’s
old friend Vicente (a stand-out
performance by the relatively
unknown Gabino Rodríguez).
While muddling along like
everyone else in the Mexican
village of Angangueo, Vicente has
been developing animistic rituals.
His performances seem excessive
at first – a young man’s high
spirits finding their eccentric
expression – but as the film
advances, we realise that these
rituals are what Mendel needs.
For him, Vicente’s rituals offer
an escape: a way to re-engage
with the living world.
Son of Monarchs is, on one
level, about identity, about how a
cosmopolitan high-flier learns to
be a good son of his home village.
But it is also about belonging:
about how Mendel learns to live
both as a scientist and as a man
lost among butterflies.
Film-maker Alexis Gambis is
himself a biologist and founded
the Imagine Science Film Festival.
While Son of Monarchs is steeped
in colour, and full of
cinematographer Alejandro
Mejía’s mouth-watering and
occasionally stomach-churning
macro-photography of butterflies
and their pupae, ultimately this
isn’t a film about the findings
of science. It is about science as
a vocation and how to relight the
spark of curiosity. It is a hopeful
film and, on more than the visual
level, a beautiful one. ❚AL
EJANDROMEJÍA
/WAR
NE
RMEDIA^ ONEFIFTYMendel (Tenoch Huerta)
is a scientist who works
in a New York labFilm
Son of Monarchs
Alexis Gambis
In selected cinemas
and on HBO MaxSimon also
recommends...
Books
Paper
John McCabe
Black Swan
The numbing futility of the
bench scientist’s life is sent
up wonderfully in this tale
of desperation, time-wasting
and murder.When We Cease to
Understand the World
Benjamín Labatut
Pushkin Press
Shortlisted for this year’s
International Booker prize,
this “factual novel” sees
the founders of quantum
mechanics struggle with the
implications of their work.Simon Ings is a novelist and
science writer. Follow him on
Instagram at @simon_ings