Kekexili Mountain Patrol

Kekexili Mountain Patrol by Lu Chuan provides a perfect opening gambit to this blog. Epic, innovative, beautifully meditative and complex; it epitomises some of the reasons why Asian cinema is so exciting, modifying genres and forms to its own narrative ends to create something fresh and utterly compelling. The fact that it has been produced in part by Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia demonstrates that Hollywood has also started taking notice of the talent emerging from the east. The fact that Columbia is owned by Sony indicates that it has perhaps realised this a little too late.

The film follows Beijing journalist Ga Yu to the remotest region of Tibet, where the self styled vigilante Ri Tai and his rag-tag group of soldiers have formed an anti-poaching unit to defend the endangered white antelope in the Kekexili wilderness. There is nothing Hollywood likes more than an inspiring true story, and Kekexili is certainly that, yet this is a film that is firmly beyond Hollywood's imaginative scope. For one thing it tells its story with an incredible visual economy that is worthy of Sergeo Leone's westerns, and makes equally good use of the stunning landscapes in which the rough-hewn, long-coated figures encounter one another. Within minutes of the film starting we witness the poachers capturing and executing one of the mountain patrol, as an antelope is skinned in the background, with barely a word spoken.

The film is unremittedly brutal, depicting the harshness of life with a lightness that Hollywood would struggle to justify with its glib morality. In one scene a group of poachers, one old man and his sons, more victims of circumstances and poverty than criminals, are left to die in the hostile landscape because the patrol are running short of provisions. When one of his own trucks breaks down Ri Tai even leaves behind some of his own men rather than turn back; his single-minded desire to capture the poachers reminiscent of Ahab's obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, and doesn't end much better. Even so there is a moral complexity at work in the film that prevents it from the kind of didacticism that the environmental subject matter could produce, and the camera often registers the shock etched on Ga Yu's face at Ri Tai's ruthless methods. Short of men, money and guns Ri Tai even submits to selling some of the antelope pelts they have confiscated, thus feeding the very industry he is trying to stamp out.

Despite its harshness Kekexili is also deeply meditative, the violence being tempered by the stillness of the sublime landscapes and the stoicism of the characters, both of which depend more upon Taoism than any generic factors (this is after all an 'Eastern' rather than a 'Western'). These elements are taken to an extreme in the scene in which one man, alone and changing his tyre, is silently and arbitrarily swallowed up by quicksand. Both in its brutal visual economy and its measured moments of stillness, this is a film that triumphs cinematically. Its longshots dwarf the human characters against a hostile landscape, which becomes a character itself coming alive in dust storms and strange rumblings that punctuate the narrative. Aside from Leone's Weterns these shots recall Kurosawa's come-back Dersu Uzala, a poetic study of man's struggle with the harsh Siberian environment.