Beautiful if surprisingly gabby, the nature documentary “The Velvet Queen” chronicles the renowned wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and his pal, writer Sylvain Tesson, as they track the cagey, evasive snow leopard along the crags and valleys of the high Tibetan plateau. There are other living things along their trek, including birds, humans and bears. Living or dead, wondrous sights dominate their field of vision, and the film’s. Silence and waiting are the names of this game.
And yet the silence in “The Velvet Queen” is nearly as rare as a snow leopard sighting. Our voiceover narrator, Tesson, who later wrote a book about the experience, is given to musings philosophique, including the head-tilter: “Prehistory wept, and each tear was a yak.”
This is one of those poetical nonfiction eyefuls determined to make its primary subjects seem like they were alone with their thoughts, their camera equipment and their expectant yearning. Co-director and co-writer Marie Amiguet, the woman behind the camera filming the men behind their cameras and binoculars, is rarely, if ever, acknowledged.
Munier lives by the credo of “the blind,” the art and strategy of finding the right, hidden vantage point to avoid easy discovery by his camera subjects. Photographing “snowy owls in the Arctic,” the garrulous Tesson says, or “reindeer in Siberia,” his host on this Tibetan adventure “has made the blind both his aesthetic and his philosophy.” Munier’s drive is weirdly akin to the stalker’s lament: How can I get closer to my obsessions in their natural habitat, when they just want to be left alone?
There’s a gentle odd-couple vibe with Munier, the loner-sage who craves close communion with nature, and Tesson, “hasty” by temperament, who finds Munier’s operating principles — “scorn pain, ignore time” — outside of his natural habitat. Munier cherishes land that “humans haven’t yet gotten their claws into.” The closest “The Velvet Queen” ever gets to polemics or environmental warnings are the simple words that only a dolt would consider controversial: “Be content with the world. Fight for it to remain.”
The most arresting image in a film full of them? I’d vote for the “Blow-Up” moment. Munier speaks in hushed tones to Tesson about making a photo of a bird on a Tibetan mountain, only to realize later that the rock in the upper left corner of the image wasn’t a rock: It was a snow leopard, master of camouflage, staring directly at the man with the camera. We see the photograph for ourselves, so we make the discovery more or less in real time. It’s a wonderful moment. Other plusses include a plaintive score by Warren Ellis, working with Nick Cave, and the fascinating close-ups of a species native to the Asian steppes known as Pallas’s Cat — the feline equivalent to Flattop in the old “Dick Tracy” comic strip.
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“The Velvet Queen” — 3 stars
No MPAA rating (some animal violence, considerable French philosophizing)
Running time: 1:32. In French and Tibetan with English subtitles.
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