With the mild misleading title Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, French-based Gonzalo Arijón documents seventy-two days of frozen misery, an amazing emergence from it and the extreme measure taken to do so, by a group that numbered several friends of his Montevideo boyhood. Although worldwide media coverage is implied, 1972 eyes in this country were fastened on Allende, the Khmer Rouge, Haiphong harbor, Northern Ireland, and looming recession. The story became known because of the Piers Paul Read Alive! The Story of the Andes Survivors. Four years later Mexico’s pedestrian based-on Survive! made no impact, while, despite a sequence that made anyone afraid to fly, America’s 1993 based-on Alive went soupy-spiritual in bearded John Malkovich’s cameo musings on the Almighty and Aaron Neville’s quavering “Ave Maria.”

From the latter two, memory may hazily jog itself to the event: a plane crash in the high sierra, the ten-week survival of sixteen of the twenty-nine mostly teenage rugby players not killed on impact, their two messengers who reached the outside world, and the revelation of  eating the cold-preserved bodies of dead companions when food was nearly out.

Invariably passed over in silence, the ultimate taboo of consuming fellows’ flesh is in reality not unheard of outside explorers’ and missionaries’ accounts of “savages,” as in wartime and siege, in famine and accidental disaster, the most infamous domestic case being the Donner-Reed party near Reno in 1846-47. While to its credit the Ethan Hawke movie includes frank confrontation of the issue, this newest consideration takes advantage of access to the remaining participants thirty-six years after the events, successful men in their fifties who still live near one another in the same tony suburb. Only towards the end does it become apparent that the headshots are taken on a pilgrimage as, in wider views, some of them accompanied by their offspring, the men are recorded on their hiking return to ponder, bond and pay homage at the “Valley of Tears” crash site.

The merit of Stranded lies in the men as they are today, in their reflections on individual death, on why others died and they didn’t, on God and family, hardship and sacrifice. Such thoughts are not unique, but what sets them apart are the here less-dwelt-on Lord of the Flies establishing of a social order when a radio broadcast indicates the world has given them up as forever gone, and the core dilemma of ingesting protein in human flesh. Some regurgitate the slivers of meat at first, but the act is not referred to as “cannibalism,” but seen as pure necessity for continuing life that, indeed, is the unspoken will of dead comrades. Several maintain that, had they succumbed, such would have been their wish, too.

Shortly before the ending, there’s the news conference at which the young men announced how they had kept together body and soul. The media audience responds in sympathetic applause even as the analogy is drawn, as it already has been by individuals throughout, to the Last Supper, Christ’s invitation to partake of His body and blood in act of Communion. This December 23 “Miracle of the Andes” stands on its own without press inaccuracy about “winter” at more than two miles up, for Southern Hemisphere summer had begun two days before and spring thaws made possible the mission down for help.

The grown men speaking to the camera show no tears, are matter-of-fact, perhaps out of machismo. Pragmatic and thankful, yes, but not given to northern sentimentality.

To its detriment, the documentary relies on the “non-fiction” television -- and, more and more, feature film -- use of snatches of static recreation mixed with and undifferentiated from the actual. It is asserted that only one in-flight photo was snapped and another on the ground -- if there was a camera, why not more? -- and so aside from interviews the rest is early home-movie of the carefree bunch at the airport, pans of mountains, lots of appropriately bleached Super 16 footage of the ordeal, and a repeated out-of-place shot of a young man staring at the Río de la Plata. Co-cinematographer César Charlone himself was lucky not to have arrived in time to take his scheduled seat on that Flight 571, but his lens is not up to capturing the aftershock -- the moments of the crash are not attempted -- the subsequent avalanche that killed eight more, and the growing lethargy that engulfed the still-living.

Film festival awards and media encomiums notwithstanding, Stranded does not come to grips with what we think of as “miracle.” Perhaps nothing could have done so, which explains why symbols are commonly substituted to enable man to conceptualize that which he cannot see. 

(Released by Zeitgeist Films; not rated by MPAA.)