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'Mountain Patrol: Kekexili': A rugged, soulful story of survival

The woolly beige beauty of the Tibetan antelope is on short display in "Mountain Patrol: Kekexili," a tense Chinese wilderness drama about the hunt for the animal's relentless poachers. Instead, the antelope, springy and lithe, are seen as pieces and parts, skinned and broken, their valuable pelts laid out in the snow, forming a momentous carpet of mourning, a sort of wildlife AIDS quilt.

National Geographic 'Mountain Patrol: Kekexili' 3 out of 5 stars The verdict: Chinese drama captures the struggle against poachers in Tibet's wilderness Director: Lu Chuan Starring: Duo Bujie, Zhang Lei, Qi Liang, Zhao Xueying Run time: 95 minutes Release date: April 14, 2006 Rating: Not rated. Language: In Mandarin and Tibetan with English subtitles. On the web Official movie site [an error occurred while processing this directive]

This entrancing, wind-whisked picture is more about the humans outraged by the antelope slaughter, which really happened in Kekexili, a yawning animal reserve in the mountainous border area of Tibet. The antelope population was slashed from 1 million to 70,000 during a five-year period in the 1990s, when the film is set.

Through the dismayed eyes of a young Beijing journalist (Lei Zhang), the fictional account follows a volunteer patrol as it embarks on a mission to apprehend a ruthless cabal of poachers who recently murdered a member of the patrol. Led by the fiercely driven Ri Tai (a riveting Duobuji), whose violent eruptions reveal a vengeful moral flint, the group arrests every human they come across, until they find and seize a motley band of actual poachers.

But in this setting, a heartless moonscape of blizzards and sandstorms (and a swallowing swatch of quicksand), the narrative focus sidewinds from criminal justice to chilling survival. Food and fuel run low, sacrifices are made and moral quandaries mount distressingly.

Next to the antelope, character arc is a casualty here. Writer-director Lu Chuan, in his second feature, attains such a strong sense of docudrama that his faint character sketches languish, stunted. Only Ri Tai stands out as full-blooded, while the journalist as audience surrogate remains an empty vessel, getting lost in the shuffle of men in olive parkas. The elderly poacher who makes a soulful connection with Ri Tai is poignantly memorable, and no one will forget the gargoyle visages of the bone-picking vultures.

The film's action and moral urgency hold it together. "Mountain Patrol" is redolent of the recent animal docudrama "The Story of the Weeping Camel" in its ravishing mingling of natural and ornamental beauty, tribal ritual and earthly chaos. (Both films were co-produced by National Geographic.) The new film also bears the pressing strains of activist storytelling, à la "Gorillas in the Mist."

Chuan wants us to feel the tragedy of both antelope and human, and we do. His camera holds a mournful gaze in shots of stark, searing simplicity that reveal huge restless skies, undulating green mountains and flat desert sprawls of icy crust and muddy slurry. Chuan makes sure the men are dwarfed by the scenery, their desolation cruelly amplified. Sometimes they are nothing more than silhouettes, their features stolen by the light.

This hard and harrowing drama might be strewn with heartache, yet it spirits you, and rewards with the piquant savor of another world.