PEMA TSEDEN: SNOW LEOPARD (2023) - 2024 NYAFF

Everyday problems and the eternal in Tibet

It's hard to know sometimes what is going on in Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden's posthumous film Snow Leopard. It awakens vivid feelings of place and presence, the beautiful, remote, snowy landscape and the eponymous snow leopard (or snow leopards) who are calmer, smarter, and infinitely more powerful, lithe and dangerous than humans. Tseden captures both ordinariness and magic here in a simple tale of a wild animal mauling livestock that resolves into something both messy and transcendent, with arguments and threats and an intervention by the law in between. I would say this is about mediation and transcendence. John Berra in his Venice SCreen Daily review says it's about "the tension between tradition and modernity, " and there's that too. Director Tseden's mastery is in using simple elements to convey levels of meaning, bringing in multiple subjects without losing focus. He is the founder of Tibetan cinema, and his death at 53 of heart failure is a tragic, too early loss.

Between the trapped leopard who has come in the night and killed nine rams and their furious herder Kimba (Jinpa), who, saying each ram is worth a thousand yuan and he wants both compensation and revenge, has trapped the great beast in his pen, is the young "snow leopard monk" or lama (Tseten Tashi) into whose gentleness and fantasy life the film compellingly escapes.

The most memorable sequence in the film is (spoiler alert) a dream filmed in chilly monochrome in which the monk, in extremis, lost and exhausted at the end of a pilgrimage, is rescued by the snow leopard he met as a cub. Metaphor morphs into personality in the character of the young monk, a quiet, gentle, mysterious, playful young man who becomes a magnet for the film's sympathy and affection, its desire to bond with nature and the Other. He promises that he recites sutras too, but capturing snow leopards on his cell phone camera months ago, a clip that went viral, has led to his being given a camera with a long lens. He carries it about with him to pursue his obsession. While the snow leopard is a predator for the rancher, a great subject for the TV crew, and a "a first-class protected animal" for the local official, for the monk it's something ineffable and essential, the goal he pursues.

Meanwhile this film is also more broadly about itself: the first, foreground, characters we meet are a TV team traveling out to this remote place like naturalists and ethnographers to film a show. The lead journalist, Wang-xu (Ziqi Xiong), is a friend of the young monk from junior high, and they rendez-vous on the road. The angry ram owner and the beautiful trapped beast are perfect subjects for the film crew. The ram owner seems like director Tseden laughing at reality TV with his mugging for the camera. But he also represents humans acting beastly and, from another angle, a local who rejects outsiders coming to lecture him about protected species. The police are called in by the furious local official, also on the scene, and even then things keep getting worse, but finally, with a lot of translating back and forth, an understanding and acceptance are reached. But what matters is the unexpected manner in which the snow leopard behaves when released.

Exactly how the snow leopard action sequences were shot may puzzle you, but the beasts themselves, in the awesome snowy landscape and mountain lake, linger in the mind as complex presences, wild, inexplicable, massive but featherlight, lumbering on tiptoe but lightening quick, sweet and deadly, friendly but wholly other. It's for the snow leopard that this film exists, and if it works for you, nothing else gets in the way. The closing credits music is wholly fresh, a remnant of a location that was strange yet real.

Snow Leopard. 雪豹 | གངས་གཟིག 109 min., debuted out of competition at Venice, presented as an official selection at Toronto and won the Grand Prix in Nov. 2023 at Tokyo; also shown at Warsaw, Paris, Lyon and Moscow. Screened for this review as part of the 2024 NYAFF (Jul. 12-28).
SCHEDULE:
Sunday July 21, 6:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.