Review of the documentary film “In Search of the Snow Leopard” by Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier

At the box office – a documentary film by Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier “In Search of a Snow Leopard”. To fully enjoy the virgin beauties of Tibet and the grace of the fauna inhabiting it Mikhail Trofimenkov the talkative authors of the film were pretty disturbing.

“The leopard is looking at us!”, “The leopard is very close!”, “See, the crows are flying? This is a good sign: they always follow predators”, “Look, look! There, against the background of the sky, a little to the right, this is the shadow of the leopard’s tail! A film about the expedition of journalist Sylvain Tesson and photographer Vincent Munier, two passionate explorers of wildlife and the coldest nooks and crannies of the Earth, in search of a snow leopard that skillfully avoids encounters with sapiens, is full of such remarks.

At some point, this almost manic hunt for the slightest hint of the presence of the rarest – three years ago, there were from 2,700 to 3,400 individuals in the world – beast reaches surreal heights. Looking at a photograph of a seemingly lifeless mountain, Tesson and Munier distinguish among the stone folds and ledges the head of a lurking “client”. One cannot avoid associations with Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” (1966), where the hero-photographer, magnifying an innocent picture of a London park, discerned the corpse of a man under the bushes.

In the end, the viewer not only resigns himself, but comfortably gets used to the idea that the characters will never meet the snow leopard. In this, from a purely formal point of view, the failure of the expedition even has a conceptual meaning.

In fact: a film crew of four climbs into an inaccessible region of Tibet, located at an altitude of 5300 meters, shudders from a 35-degree frost, freezes in ambushes – and all this is in vain. Sorry, dear viewers, we tried very hard, but something went wrong. We really wanted to see the leopard, but this desire, as it turned out, was not mutual. What to do, the leopard is the master here, he has to choose whom to honor with his presence. Such a technical defeat would be an almost Buddhist experience of humility, the recognition that “movement is everything, the goal is nothing”, an experience of self-knowledge at last.

But Tesson and Munier would not have returned empty-handed either. They would amaze the audience with impressive Tibetan panoramas and sketches from the life of other local residents who are not so scrupulous in communicating with people. Light-footed antelope, a whole herd of blue sheep, llamas and other bird bears.

Alas, our heroes achieve their goal, and the snow leopard appears in all its splendor at the very end of the film. It can be doubted that the editing chronology is adequate to the chronology of the expedition: the outline of the film document seems to be painfully literary. But this, by and large, is nonsense.

A smoky gray cat with ring-shaped dark spots on a long and warm coat, almost merging with the environment, is really cute. But its authors are caught in a not too “secular” situation: a leopard feasts on the intestines of a dead ram. And the cries of delight in this situation sound somehow strange.

In general, the main sin of the film is its talkativeness. The heroes incessantly spew out streams of platitudes and nonsense of an allegedly philosophical nature, praising the “territory of freedom” in which they find themselves. They lament that in the profane fuss of the “human comedy” people have abandoned ontological freedom, independence, awareness of the greatness and significance of nature. That in the stone jungle there was no fresh air, no beautiful trees, not even hedges. They come to the conclusion that only nature “does not pretend”, whatever that means, and in the golden age, animals, people and gods spoke the same language. Not without mentioning the hippie idol Milarepa, the most enlightened yogi of the 11th-12th centuries, it was in these places that he secluded himself in a cave and ate only nettles, from which he himself turned green.

But the whole idyll of the confluence of brave travelers with the supposedly uninhabited island of the golden age, despicable by mankind, is spoiled by a flock of Tibetan children bursting into the frame with school problem books and almost iPads: “Uncles, what are you doing here?” I’m sorry, what? We’ll post cats.