Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit’s Saving Luna is a prime example of how an excellent story can overcome otherwise pedestrian filmmaking. The documentary suffers from flaws on almost every level, but the tale it tells ultimately triumphs.
Luna is an orphaned young male orca, who takes up residence in a bay near a small Vancouver Island town after being separated from his pod. Orcas being social creatures by nature, Luna turns to the passengers on the bay’s boats for the interaction he would normally get from his whale brethren. This situation causes tension within the surrounding community. Many find Luna charming and wish to return his advances. Scientists argue that interaction with humans will only be harmful for the whale. Fishermen are just plain annoyed by Luna’s interfering.
As the years pass and it becomes clear that Luna isn’t going anywhere on his own, the tension builds into a hostile conflict between those who wish to return Luna to his pod, those who want to nurture the lonely whale and those who want to put a bullet in his head. The issues these circumstances allow Chisholm and Parfit to raise, namely the distinction between man and animal and our tendency to anthropomorphize, are thought provoking, and some of the feats performed in order to protect Luna are truly extraordinary.
Saving Luna falters elsewhere, though. In addition to co-directing, Parfit tackles writing duties and packs the film with overwrought, quasi-spiritual gobbledygook at every turn. Unnecessary purple language is often a problem in nature documentaries, but here it’s so prevalent that it becomes distracting at best and unintentionally hilarious at worst.
The filmmakers also struggle with maintaining objectivity. An effort is made early on to present the various factions equally, but this approach is abandoned about halfway through. At this point, Parfit becomes an increasingly ubiquitous onscreen presence and Saving Luna begins to demonize the cold, clinical bastards who look at the Luna situation scientifically.
Despite these and other shortcomings, the tragic story of Luna and the profound impact the whale had on the B.C. community shines through. It would have been nice if Chisholm and Parfit would have simply presented the facts and allowed audiences to come to their own conclusions, but the strength of the story triumphs in the end.
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