In the Sprawl of the Mountain King

Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2006)

Rating ... A- (81)

In 2003's less-than-fulfulling The Last Samurai, director Edward Zwick tackled collective outdatedness and moral dilemma in a foreign land with paint-by-numbers plotting, wildly inconsistent tone, and overall simultaneous cake-having and eating. Thematic stances remained as obligatorily vague as possible ("open to interpretation") while technological and spiritual withering was portrayed with highly bewildering corporeality as it was shown that guns bested katanas. Ultimately his questionable tactics and/or omissions betrayed general ineptitude and allowed room for Tom Cruise to utter such baffling statements (this particular one in response to the idea of control over one's fate) as "A man does what he can ... until his destiny becomes apparent!" though had Zwick endeavored to take a more assured approach to his material, the result may have been something resembling the soft-spoken grandeur and distressing uncertainty of Kekexili: Mountain Patrol.

Reminiscent of 2004's suitably harrowing Touching the Void, Kekexili is a docudrama that recreates the exploits of a governmentally-unofficial patrol of Tibetan woodsmen banded together to fend off poachers of the antelope indigenous to the Kekexili plain. At a brisk 89 minutes, Kekexili is simple in story but tenacious in scope. Of course, it helps immensely that director Lu Chuan is such a arresting teller of tales in terms of the visual canvas (to the degree that many of his infrequent interchanges are rendered unnecessary) considering cinematography is effectively employed to substantiate virtually every point Kekexili sets out to make. The most frequently revisited tactic is the film's palpable use of extreme-long shot distance, where action occurs both in the foreground and at the far corners of the camera's grasp. Simultaneously evoking the patrol's inherent diminuitiveness in the vastness of nature and instilling Kekexili with a touch of doubt and unease, Lu Chuan's imagery parallels his characters' tangible and ethical dubiety. In a time of underfunding and material hardship for the group, immediate concerns range from car trouble to missing members, but the most unnerving uncertainty that looms over the patrol is quite simply whether or not their actions will leave a lasting effect on the antelope population. In perhaps the most stunning example of Kekexili's visual technique, the camera observes placidly as two party members must stay behind on account of insufficient supplies, their subsistence in jeopardy, while light refraction causes the images of the men to waver in the afternoon sun. Contrary to its primary implications of compromised values and moral equivocacy, Kekexili is a film of remarkable clarity.