Yes, I know what you’re thinking – I’m not sitting through a Tibetan film about a rag-tag gang of volunteers protecting antelope from poachers. But Chuan Lu’s Mountain Patrol is, as issue dramas go, rather more thrilling than, say, a Green Cross Code commercial.
Unsurprisingly, the film shares the ethnographic charms of recent Mongolia vignettes The Story Of The Weeping Camel and The Cave Of The Yellow Dog, but where those projects took refuge in picturesque idylls, Mountain Patrol explores the forbidding ends of the earth. Played out over weeks, the film is almost certainly the most epic car chase ever committed to celluloid. As the volunteers tail the poachers further into bleak icy desert, it becomes clear that nobody will make it back alive.
There are startling details. The sun blazes down while snow crunches under foot. Antelope carcasses are scattered as far as the eye can see. Good time girls pour drinks and party in lonely outposts. It’s enough to make you yearn for the comparatively civilised outback of The Proposition.
Happily, the film had an immediate impact in China, leading the government to offer support to the protection of local species. They’ve even made the Tibetan antelope the official mascot of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Now if only they could treat their human population better…