WOLF TOTEM
DIRECTOR: Jean-Jacques Annaud
CAST: Shaofeng Feng, Shawn Dou, Yin Zhusheng, Basen Zhabu, Baoyingexige
CLASSIFICATION: 13 V
RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes
RATING: 3 stars (out of 5)
Theresa Smith
WHILE visually stunning, this Chinese French collaboration is melodramatic and narratively disjointed. It is a man-and-his-dog story meets outsider-learning-to-appreciate-a-new culture story, just set in a place unfamiliar to Western audiences.
Taking its cue from the best-selling semi-autobiographic Chinese novel of the same name the film starts off with two urban Chinese students – Chen Zhen (Feng) and Yang Ke (Dou) – being despatched to inner Mongolia as part of China’s Cultural Revolution.
It is 1967 and the two are supposed to be teaching the Mongolians to read and write Chinese but this concept is only mentioned at the beginning and never referred to again.
Instead, young Chen becomes enamoured of this new culture he finds himself immersed into and attaches himself to the leader of the particular group of herders he is assigned to, Bilig (Zhabu).
The nomadic group have a particular relationship with wolves, recognising them as a necessary part of the ecosystem, but also keeping their numbers in check to preserve the natural balance and Chen becomes so fascinated by wolves that he tries to raise one himself.
While the nomadic tribe’s elder serves as the voice of old fashioned reason, there is a villain of sorts in the form of the Chinese collective representative Bao Shunghi (Zhusheng) who, for the sake of filmic narrative, does step back from his unreasonable position right at the end of the film.
Annaud seems an odd choice to direct this film considering his 7 Years in Tibet was highly critical of the 1950s Chinese invasion of Tibet, but he goes for a very gentle, highly ecologically sensitive approach here. This is at odds with the book’s original criticism of Han-Chinese culture and collective agricultural lifestyle, which is not alluded to.
What we end up with is a protect-the-environment message critical of how encroaching collective farming destroyed the Mongolian ecology and wiped out Mongolian wolves.
Annaud shot amazing sequences of the wolves hunting in their natural habitat and their night time forays are pulse-pounding as is an amazing sequence of Mongolian horse-riders trying to contain a stampede. The sweeping vista of the Mongolian steppe is shown in all its glorious, windswept vastness.
Any negative comment the film may have been hinting at about the Chinese mistreating the Mongolians gets muddled as it becomes more and more difficult to separate the two different cultures since everyone gets in on the act of destroying their environment. Instead, the film concentrates more and more on Chen and we see how he goes from idealistic community to world-weary, disillusioned and ultimately callous young man who talks a fiery argument, but cannot muster up the will to act on his convictions.
If you liked Coming Home or Life of Pi, you will like this.