Tesson's journal entries act as a poetic narration throughout the film and he becomes a conduit for the audience in that he occasionally expresses his feelings of boredom and is less excited by the prospect of spending endless hours in freezing temperatures awaiting what could turn out to be nothing. Eventually though, the waiting pays off for him - and for us too.
The film, which is directed and filmed by Munier's partner Marie Amiguet, has an underlying message about the environment and our role in preserving it, but not in a didactic way. It reminded me of Joaquin Phoenix's documentary Gunda in delivering a clear message through observation not sermon.
Until quite recently, humans were global explorers, travelling into the unknown to discover the wonders of the world. Once, technological advances enabled us to explore further afield with increasing ease but now they're doing the opposite. The digital revolution has given us the whole world in the palm of our hands and in doing so, it's made our worlds smaller. Our phones give us fewer and fewer reasons to leave our homes. The Velvet Queen is a beautiful reminder that there's profound joy to be found in deep connection with the living world - animals, nature, other humans - if we seek to find it. And suddenly, Greg's little phone experiment doesn't seem like child's play at all. In fact, to put down your phone and play in the world with the wonder of a child, like Munier does, might actually be our only hope for contentment.
HE SAW
In our busy busy lives, we run around after our phones, trying to drive up our value and productivity, maximise our happiness and wellbeing, live our best lives, tell our friends about it, make more friends and better friends, get good hair, good bodies and good wardrobes, make plans to do lots of stuff and follow up on at least some of it. Meanwhile, somewhere in Tibet, a leopard walks slowly up a snow mottled mountainside, having just eaten the side out of a yak, probably off to have a sleep. It is, of course, impossible — and probably pointless — to compare our life with that of the Tibetan snow leopard, but we do it for the same reason we do anything, because we feel we've got to do something.
The central thesis of this movie that involves us watching two men watching the snow leopard seems to be this: We have spent so much time learning to be human, we have forgotten how to be animals. It is an engaging and beautiful ode to nature, friendship, poetry, animals, patience and the music of Nick Cave, whose original compositions help give the movie its sense of awe.
It follows the two men as they move mountain goat-like through the rocky angles of the Tibetan landscape. We learn very little about the two men and most of what we do learn comes from their extremely intermittent, whispered, information-light conversations, most of which are dominated by the phrase "c'est magnifique", because, as we quickly learn, the men really like nature and, more particularly, its animals. What do they not like? Humans. They hardly see an animal or animal remnant that doesn't make them gawp with happy awe but when they talk about humans it's mostly to point out that we've lost our capacity to exist as part of nature, that we're impatient and that we smell.
A couple of apposite quotes: "Destiny expelled us from that golden age when beasts, humans and God conducted a common conversation" and, "The earth reeks of humans." There's also a lot of talk about patience, which one of the men describes as "a supreme virtue", which is appropriate, because most of the movie involves watching them displaying it. It's boring, of course, but only if you've been brought up in a world where you feel the need to be constantly doing something.
The Velvet Queen is in cinemas from May 2.
