Tibetan film-maker Pema Tseden died of heart failure last year at the age of 53, just months after completing this movie; his health was almost certainly weakened by rough treatment from Chinese police in a notorious 2016 incident at an airport where he was prevented from retrieving his luggage, and the ensuing row escalated when police officers became involved and Tseden ended up in hospital. This ugly and possibly tragic event must surely have influenced Tseden’s final film, which mixes satirical comedy and social commentary and an enigmatic Zen reverie of innocence and experience. The fact that Tseden did die also alters the film’s meaning.
A TV crew is seen making its way in a four-wheel drive across the vast Tibetan plateau to where a monk has told them a furious farmer is keeping a snow leopard – a nationally protected animal – illegally penned up, and intending to kill it in revenge for killing nine of his lambs. The monk is riding along with the crew; he is nicknamed “Snow Leopard” because he himself was radicalised into his vocation as a young man by rescuing another snow leopard – or, who knows, perhaps this very same one – from his farming family who had strung the animal up, intending to whip it to death.
The leopard is shown with digital effects which are a little obvious; there would perhaps have been an argument for not showing the leopard on screen at all. The farmer himself is in a permanent rage, tormented beyond endurance by bland assurances from a government official that he will receive cash compensation at some unspecified time, as well as by the breezily unconcerned attitude of the TV crew, who patronise the farming family and chivvy them out of the way to get their shots, concerned only with their story and certainly not with the destruction of the farmer’s livelihood.
While everyone waits for the police to arrive, the snow leopard has to be imprisoned in the same pen as the dead lambs and the surviving sheep, the vigilant farmer shouting and prodding the leopard to make sure it doesn’t kill anything else. And when the officers arrive, the confrontation turns into painful, angry, upsetting chaos, with Tseden clearly showing us what it means to challenge uniformed authority. Perhaps he identified with both the snow leopard – a brutal predator which cares nothing for the exotic or sentimental connotations which humanity has created for it – and its captor, who cares nothing for these things either.
Tseden was not an overtly political film-maker and this is not an overtly political film; nor was the incident that might well have led ultimately to his death an overtly political incident. And yet the political implications of power are everywhere; the meanings are transformed and displaced into these characters and incidents. It’s a strange, sad swan song for this director.
• Snow Leopard is in UK cinemas from 22 November.
