The Story Of The Weeping Camel [2004] [DVD]

The camel, legend has it, was once given an impressive set of antlers as reward for its loyalty and dedicated service. Unfortunately, it is a trusting animal, and loaned its antlers to a deer ... who never returned them. The camel, to this day, remains forlornly staring at a distant horizon, awaiting the deer's return, a track of tears permanently dripping from the corner of its eye.

This is a simple evocation of desert life - the desert of the twin humped Bacterian camel, not the North African / Middle Eastern variety. We follow a small family, grandparents, adult children, infant grandchild, as they forage and eke out a calm, slow paced life in the Gobi. It is a harsh environment, one which tolerates few mistakes, but the Mongolian people know it and have adapted to its demands.

Their routines are universal - forage for fuel, cook, eat, wash, sleep, keep the young children safe, encourage adventure, play and responsibility in the older ones, cherish the people you love, and treat your livestock with respect. It's a simple life, punctuated by ritual as spoonfuls of milk are cast to the four winds, asking for a blessing on the day and the daily activity.

Filmed without commentary or comment, this drama-documentary centres around the birth of a white camel and its rejection by its mother. The farmers have to try to effect a reconciliation, have to get the mother to suckle her offspring. It's a charming, engaging film, with the undercurrent of the Mongolian tribes themselves being about to lose their antlers - the television has arrived and you wonder how long they can sustain their own cultural uniqueness and independence in the face of technology and the lure of the bright lights. Are they about to give up their birthright of knowledge of the land and their environment for the anonymity of Western consumerism?

It's a very gentle, thoroughly uplifting film which I found warmly inspirational. This is reality television of a decidedly high class. You feel you do enter into the real lives of real people and follow their daily routines, albeit in an exotic environment. You can identify with their lifestyle, can appreciate the values they uphold, and can respect their unhurried approach to life. The days plod along with the steady rhythm of the camel. You can admire this lifestyle, you can envy it ... but could you get by without TV, supermarket, motor car, etc.? Lovely film ... very lovely film.

My wife was reading when I first put it on: this was actually my strategy to avoid getting blamed if, on telling her to watch it, it turned out as obscure or inaccessible as it might at first sound. She did actually ask what I was going to watch as I loaded it.

"Er, it's a little film about some Mongolian herders in the Gobi Desert and their camels, Dear..." I offered sheepishly (and not inappropriately).

"...right..." she hemmed, returning to her book. The film started.

As the credits rolled some time later, I turned from my riveted position facing the TV. My wife was staring wide-eyed at the screen, a huge smile on her face, moisture in her eyes.

"That was absolutely fantastic!" she exclaimed.

It is. Far more beautiful than any of your over-hyped Crouching Dragons, or whatever - deliriously so, in fact, and all the more exquisite for being so real. Simple and exotic at the same time, The Weeping Camel establishes how utterly alien we all are and, at the same time, how very, very similar.

It begins with astonishing, eyeball-searing landscape and lifestyle shots that look like Luke Skywalker's home planet, with creatures from Hoth imported from the sequel (were they Bantus?). The desert looks and sounds bleak, wild, glowing and glorious. Its inhabitants (and their clothes, their habitat, their food, their songs) are both ordinary and inexpressibly glamorous.

Not too many minutes in, though, and you realise that this family is just like us; only more in tune with the humans and animals with whom they cohabit. Although the central tragi-comedy is that of the abandoned calf, the story is very much about how the people live and where they might go (the young lads are campaigning for a television when they aren't crossing the desert to fetch batteries and a violinist) - and, ultimately, about the poetic, magical, musical treatment the family finds for its ailing fellow-creatures. The depiction of the forsaken calf's plight is as poignant as the very best of Disney (and actually far less manipulative). The resolution: well, you need to see and hear it for yourselves. You won't regret it.

It really is a gorgeous piece of work. And what a nice technical surprise for us, too. Having treated ourselves to digital widescreen and fab surround-sound in the Christmas aftermath, we were busy going through the spectacular back-catalogue (Gladiator, Star Wars, West Side Story and others) to "justify" the home cinema spend. Guess what! It's the Weeping Camel that makes the best sense of giving cinematic craftsmanship maximum domestic reproduction: the pictures - of a landscape with little intrinsic variation - are endlessly gorgeous. The soundscape is just awesome: the unending wind, the interior acoustics, the cries of the animals, Odgoo's (the mother's) song to her sleep-creaky daughter, the music (including violin-strings played, Aeolian Harp-style, by the wind through a beast's fur) - utterly brilliant. Inside the tent with the family, the recording is so true that the dogs and goats sounded as if they were outside the room in which we were watching (itself also swept by that constant, fluting, roaring, raucous wind).

Everything you see and hear, everything that happens - you wonder (and rejoice) at how such artists were there with perfectly-placed cameras and mikes to help us look, listen and share. Such a simple little film, such stupendous cinema!

You've probably gathered that I can't recommend this highly enough.