The Story Of The Weeping Camel

ThinkFilm

One of the oddest films in recent memory to strike arthouse gold, The Story of the Weeping Camel comes to DVD after having grossed close to $2 million at the American box office, and $7 million worldwide. A quick description gives the impression of Weeping Camel as some sort of anti-intellectual's joke, a Saturday Night Live parody of snooty, obscurantist foreign films: a quasi-documentary from Mongolia (!) about a community's efforts to care for a white camel rejected by her mother. Nonetheless, Weeping Camel is a compelling report from a region of the world that has previously registered a cinematic blank. Purposefully blurring the line between documentary reportage and fiction, the film owes a great debt to documentary fabulists of yore like Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North).

Directors Davaa and Falorni met while studying at the Munich Film School, but their film bears little resemblance to the flatulent style that defines so much student filmmaking. Taking in the almost-alien landscapes of the Mongolian desert, the film presents an utterly unfamiliar culture through the lens of the inhabitants' ministrations to one poor animal.

Given the circumstances, it is difficult to know where real life ends and the interference of the filmmakers begins. The bright, colorful costumes, and the relative lack of shyness around the camera, are hints that the filmmakers worked closely with their subjects in establishing the feel of the film, and at the very least carefully applied the smooth textures of fiction filmmaking to their documentary subject.

A large portion of Weeping Camel's box-office success can be attributed to its depiction of a community in harmonious coexistence with the natural world. A locale where the fortunes of one camel are the business of an entire group of people is one profoundly foreign to Western sensibilities, and profoundly striking; amidst the alienation of the developed world, it is a rarity for a community to exhibit that much concern about another human being, let alone an animal.

Civilization is already creeping around the edges here, though. The young boys, sent on a mission to fetch musicians for the rite to protect the camel, are lured by the glow of televisions showing Russian cartoons, and the rumble of motorcycles drowns out the bleats of the locals' sheep. Much like Flaherty's natives, the people depicted here are on the verge of being tossed headfirst into modernity, and those of us on the other side of the wall know that means one thing above all: the likely obliteration of their traditions, their customs, and their way of life. From this angle, perched just above the rooftops of their existence, we can be grateful to Davaa and Falorni for granting us this peek into their world, shortly before the pleasant oblivion of modern life arrives, and the screen goes black.

-Saul Austerlitz