Peak patience
A nature photographer’s obsession turns into an epic quest.
These days, the more hightech nature documentaries are prone to showing a behind-the-scenes segment on what crews went through to capture the exotic critters on video. The Velvet Queen does that, too, sort of. But it makes a whole movie out of it, a visually dazzling but quietly contemplative story of zen stealth and infinite patience featuring two French blokes up a mountain in Tibet.
It’s there where nature photographer Vincent Munier and travel writer Sylvain Tesson sit and wait (and wait) to get a shot of the elusive snow leopard.
Tesson has already published an acclaimed book on the adventure, The Art of Patience: Seeking the snow leopard in Tibet. Here, his artful prose becomes the film’s existential narration (which some might find a bit florid). That’s when he’s not quizzing Munier about the philosophy behind his work or asking him with increasing alarm if those bears that they have just spotted might be coming a bit close.
There are occasional interludes with welcoming local Tibetans before the pair (and presumably their small crew) hike to another chilly highaltitude observation point and do it all again, pondering a largely untouched world while a brooding soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis nicely matches the landscape for craggy, bleak beauty.
It’s not just about the evasive big feline, either, with the dangerously cute Pallas’s cat, wild yaks, foxes, wolves and local birdlife captured in close-up by Munier’s lens.
But when their quarry finally puts in a cameo, it’s a magical moment in what is both an epic quest and highart cat video.
IN CINEMAS NOW
Russell Baillie