The emperors of romance

I’ve found the perfect date movie for summer 2005.

It isn’t “War of the Worlds.” Steven Spielberg’s bombardment of post-9/11 imagery of cities and families in collapse is the kind of experience you’d only share with a date you wanted to shake.

And forget “Wedding Crashers.” The fundamental cynicism in this tale of a couple of party-hearty guys cruising wedding receptions to prey on romantically minded women isn’t likely to unleash any terms of endearment.

The movie I’m talking about isn’t from Hollywood at all -- it’s French. And it’s a documentary. It’s “March of the Penguins.”

Stay with me.

I’d read the reviews and was prepared for a captivating look at creatures who inhabit one of the most hostile spots on Earth.

Sure enough, it’s got spectacular cinematography of the Antarctic landscape, all the more impressive when you realize it was filmed in a place where 50 below zero represents the good old summertime.

And writer-director Luc Jacquet captures lots of poignant moments on the emperor penguins’ annual journey back to their ancestral birthplace to mate.

Yet I hardly expected anything so revealing about man-woman relations. More than any movie sprung from the pages of Jane Austen, “March of the Penguins” zeroes in on some of humanity’s greatest fantasies about love, commitment and family. Maybe that’s why it’s starting to boom at the box office when many wannabe blockbusters are going “poof.”

I went with a friend who’s always had a soft spot in her heart for flightless Antarctic birds but couldn’t convince any of her other friends, male or female, to see it with her.

Frankly, I can’t imagine any woman not being enthralled looking through the window that Jacquet opens into a society in which all males dress formal, all the time.

That alone can trigger a fundamental female romantic fantasy. As Jerry Seinfeld put it in one of his old stand-up bits, “The idea behind the tuxedo is the woman’s point of view that men are all the same, so we might as well dress them that way.”

Another friend thinks that’s oversimplifying.

“Don’t be a sexist pig!” she tactfully responded after I elucidated my theory. “Tuxedo or no,” she says, “women can totally tell the difference between John, George, Paul and Ringo. It’s the rest we have trouble with.”

Not the emperor penguin.

In their world, Jacquet shows us, males and females make an arduous 70-mile trek across the ice each year.

First order of business: Find a soul mate. Second order of business: Start propagating.

And here’s where another fantasy comes in. When the really bad winter weather hits, mom hands her egg off to dad, gathers up the other girls and heads out for two months of shopping, dining and frolicking in the sea.

I swear when that scenario played out, all around me at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood a chorus of female voices whispered, “Yesssss!”

Dad, meanwhile, keeps unhatched junior balanced on his toes while trying to huddle with all the other deftly balanced fathers-and-eggs fending off 100 mph winds in 80-below-zero snowstorms. At least there’s no raking.

If it’s sounding like the movie’s ice is loaded against the guys, I found lots of wish fulfillment for our side too.

We can bask in the utter selflessness and heroic sacrifices the male emperors make, both for their mate and their offspring, imagining we’d do the same. (Pizza Hut and Netflix deliver to the South Pole, right?)

Even the “Wedding Crasher” aficionado can tap his inner penguin in the part where narrator Morgan Freeman drolly notes how these hardy creatures are monogamous -- to an extent. In a ritual dating back thousands of years, males, blessed with a buyer’s market, choose a mate from legions of females.

Once paired up, these tuxedoed males demonstrate total commitment and devotion to their partner and their young one through some of the harshest environmental conditions on the planet outside of Pacoima in July. And they do it unceasingly, relentlessly. For a year.

Then it’s sayonara, sweetheart, and off with the boys to the coast until next year at the same time, when they waddle back to find a brand-new soul mate. Sort of “Deuce Bigalow -- Antarctic Gigolo.”

I swear, the only thing keeping “March of the Penguins” from ruling at the box office every Friday and Saturday night is that title. But I’ve got that wired too, and just in time for the national release: “Antarctica -- The Real Fantasy Island.”

Randy Lewis can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.