Who would have thought that the endless Mongolian prairies are the perfect setting for beautiful film scenes? The French cinematographer Aymerick Pilanski deserves as much credit for this film as director Quan'an Wang. His shots of the vast landscape, without roads, trees, buildings or any other points of orientation, are simply magnificent. He uses the broad, horizontal cinemascope format to the max: there are many slow movements from one side of the screen to the other.
The story itself has a nice dose of weirdness, as you would expect from an area like Mongolia where things often are not quite what they are in other countries. The film starts with a very strong scene: the camera shows the prairie at night, seen from the windscreen of a slowly moving car, while the chauffeur and the passenger exchange mindless banter, until the body of a dead woman suddenly appears in the headlights.
But this film is not a murder story. It doesn't matter who the dead woman is, nor how she got killed. The film tells the story of a young policeman, left behind to guard the crime scene, and a young local woman, living alone in a yurt, sent out to assist the policeman.
The events that follow have one thing in common: birth and fertility. This central theme is what binds the scenes together. The film looks beautiful and has some wonderful moments, but towards the end it all feels a bit artificial and contrived. The lack of a strong plot doesn't help. But the film is definitely worth seeing, if only for the impressive cinematography and the setting in this somewhat strange country.
