Great little film. Some of the reviews I read said “harrowing”–to agonizingly work away, “with painful slowness”. I wouldn’t say painful, but there is a grim dedication, in the characters and in the advancement of the plot, which in the last thirty minutes (of a short film) does have an absolutely enthralling hold on the viewer.
Set in the high plains of Tibet, the (based-on-a-true) story conveys the tribulations of a group of a volunteer, anti-poaching posse, intent on protecting the dwindling herds of antelopes. The film is gorgeously composed, and has moments of high, compelling action, but depicted in a manner you might call naturalistic. The death of an antelope by machine gun, for example, might be shot in one distant long take, in a careful composition with the killer and victim squared off and the event painstakingly set up and then enacted; the violence between men echoes such moments, and is equally steady. I.e., it’s got none of the pulse-raising freneticism of more typical “action” films. Instead, Patrol recalled The Wages of Fear or Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”–a sense of a fatal environment which dwarves, or shows up the pathetic triviality, of a quotidian human cruelty in the foreground.
Which all sounds really damn heavy, doesn’t it? I would say the film, at a lean 89 minutes, has almost no fat on it, and none of this pontificating. Nor, for that matter, is it nasty brutish stuff; there’s wit, a lot of empathy and passion, and quite a bit of beauty. I just really liked this film.
And if I were more knowledgeable, I might try to circle around whether this Chinese production romanticizes & appropriates Tibetan purity or sets up a more complicated allegorical reading of poaching and colonization…. but I’m not sure I have anything to say beyond wondering which is a more defensible interpretation.