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Know Your Mushrooms

• Directed and written by Ron Mann
• Starring many fungi
• Classification: G
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But first, a personal note that might even be true. Once, some time past, I fell hard for a woman who had a considerable passion for wild mushrooms but, alas, only a slight interest in tame me. Nothing delighted her more than traipsing through a soggy woodland in search of fungal trophies. By contrast, nothing pleased her less than the old Woody Allen joke I would steal to excuse myself from these sylvan jaunts: "Nature and I are as two." And so, as two, she and I soon parted. Ever since, my relationship with mushrooms has been tepid at best — oh, maybe a few on the odd pizza, or a portobello fired up on the barbecue, but nothing more.

Excuse the digression, but it serves to explain the heavy psychic baggage, the preconceived bias, I brought to Ron Mann's latest idiosyncratic doc. The very title, Know Your Mushrooms, was enough to put me off my feed. Nevertheless, ever your intrepid guide, I plunged in, partly for the paycheque and partly because, throughout his career, Mann has always possessed an engaging and playful way with cultural marginalia, from the free jazz of Imagine the Sound to the dance craze in Twist. What's more, the guy has prophetic antennae, exploring the peripheral before it becomes mainstream. More than 20 years ago, he made Comic Book Confidential, and now, of course, there's nothing remotely confidential about the damn comics — they seem to fuel every second blockbuster coming down the cinematic pike.

Mushrooms, then. The entire film is centred on a four-day event held annually in the mountains of Colorado and called, succinctly enough, the Telluride Mushroom Festival. There, our principal guides are Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans, both ardent hunter-gatherers and fungophiles extraordinaire. Evans, who sports the craggy features and grey ponytail of every aging hippie, is an especially zealous student of the 'shroom, and has travelled the world to advance his studies. As for those "common button" varieties that adorn our grocery store shelves, these fellows disdain such commercial stuff — there's far tastier eating to be had for free in the wild. And don't worry too much about the poisonous species — only a few, we're assured, are toxic enough to kill you.

So the hard facts emerge. Who knew, for example, that fungi are not only the oldest but also, with their tendrils creeping indefatigably beneath the dark earth, the largest living organisms. And their benefits appear to be endless. A truffle is an aphrodisiac, if you believe the French. Shiitakes are guaranteed to lower blood pressure, if you credit the Japanese. Indeed, all cultures, through all times, have tapped the medicinal potential of various species. Today, even the conservationists are getting into the act — seems that nothing cleans up an oil spill faster than an absorbent truck-full of oyster mushrooms.

And we've yet to get to the "magic" strains, the hallucinogenic psilocybes, used as spiritual transporters by ancient priests and contemporary hopheads alike. Lincoff discusses in long and loving detail his first trip, then proves that its effects haven't quite worn off when he makes the evolutionary claim that "mushrooms are the catalyst for human consciousness." Like, far out, man.

Happily, Mann treats the whole subject less earnestly than the acolytes, leaving his camera to observe and us to judge. Better still, he supplements the interviews with his trademark mix of cute animated sequences, campy archival footage, and a lively pop score, trusting that his standard methods will yield the usual result. And they do: Like Calvin Trillin in print, or Errol Morris on screen, Mann has the knack of generating fascination where none seemed to exist, of carving intrigue from an apparently non-intriguing topic — okay, a measure of intrigue anyway.

Yes, count me a convert, if not yet a cognoscenti. Still, like Alice when she's 10 feet tall, my knowledge has definitely mushroomed, enough to know that, somewhere in those fungal woodlands, there's a remedy for most everything — maybe even the lingering strains of an old love long unrequited.