Mountain Patrol: Kekexili
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, May 4, 2006
One thing movies have over any other art form is the ability to show you the edges of the earth, places you’d likely never reach. “Mountain Patrol: Kekexili” takes you to one of those places; it’s an eye-popping and rather harrowing trip into the high plateaus of Tibet.
This film is based on real events that happened in the 1990s. The coat of the Tibetan antelope became valuable, and poachers devastated the population of this animal. Local Tibetan villagers decided to band together to protect the antelope.
The story of one such patrol is told in “Kekexili” (the word for the animal reserve home of the antelope). Fascinatingly, this terse, stylish film resolves itself along the lines of an old-fashioned Western.
We begin with the arrival of a Beijing journalist (Zhang Lei) in a village. He wants to meet the charismatic leader of the mountain patrol, Ritai (Duo Bujie), and maybe tag along with a posse.
His bad luck is that he gets to go. Ritai gathers his men together for an epic ride to chase poachers. Although they go out in broken-down trucks, the effect is much the same as cowboys saddling up to track the bad guys into the desert.
Some spectacular scenes follow: The patrol chases poachers across a freezing river, discovers dozens of carcasses on a killing field, and splits up to continue the pursuit.
What’s interesting is that early on we get hints that Ritai’s commitment to finding the poachers has become a reckless obsession. He’s Captain Ahab, and even when the patrol has burned through its supplies and gasoline, he’ll press on.
So this film has a lot going for it: stupendous scenery, a novel environmental-action angle and a fascinating central character. The iconic presence of Duo Bujie in the lead role helps. This guy could sit in a room with Clint Eastwood and Japanese tough guy Takeshi Kitano and not blink first.
Plus, there’s a quicksand scene. A quicksand scene always improves a movie.
Director-writer Lu Chuan is a film-school graduate who clearly has studied everybody from Spielberg to Sam Peckinpah. Yet he has a style of his own, and a real grasp of the gray areas that well-meaning people can find themselves in. I would expect Hollywood to offer him a go at the next “Mission: Impossible” movie, but he probably has better things to do.
