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Rating: "It's the beauty that hurts you most"
I've always loved this phrase, this concept, expressed in Rectify, a little-known series from about ten years ago. Because it's so true. It's beauty that hurts, that wounds the most. Because once you have experienced it, touched it, perceived it next to and within you, you can't go back to pretending that everything else makes sense, has meaning.
Beauty is everything. But not beauty as understood by the false myths of modern man. True beauty is not something that can be consumed, reduced, trivialized, bought. This is why the frantic search for happiness within the confines of urban life is futile, because only beauty can make us happy. And authentic beauty is elusive, very distant from us, it comes rarely, like something undeserved. A miracle.
In the peaks and unspoiled, untouched nature, you can find and feel the presence of an intense and poignant spirituality. Not the kind of spirituality normally understood, like one tied to the presence of a God imagined and created by man over the millennia. God, as John Lennon said, is a concept by which we measure our pain.
The spirituality you can perceive and know through contact with nature and the sight of an animal, is rather something that brings you back to the root, reconnecting you to the deepest and most ancestral self, to original sensations that were present long before the advent of technology, cities, capitalism, and industrialization. And to which we have renounced.
Even if man's dreams - from the dawn of time until today - have then led to artistic creation, nothing can equal the effect and magic of natural creation and the free existence of its living beings.
"The animal has a key that opens a door, behind the incommunicable"
The Snow Leopard is, more than a film, an experience, a hymn, an ode to wonder and love. A contemplative work that reflects on how wrong our gaze is, the gaze of those who cross states and landscapes (and entire eras) without paying attention, without valuing anything, except when it is gone, and most of the time not even then.
A life lesson, on the value of patience, waiting, on not having expectations but knowing how to grasp the extraordinariness of every appearance. Welcoming it as a privilege, a divine sign, perhaps, even if the beauty of nature is actually entirely belonging to a Earth, ours, ravaged and defaced by man.
"We watched the landscape, without being sure of reaping any rewards. We awaited a shadow, in silence, before the void. It was the opposite of an advertising promise. To the all and now of modern epilepsy, opposed the perhaps little or perhaps nothing of the stakeout."
Every encounter with each of these creatures reminds you how everything must be absolutely lived as a gift. And even if the main aim is to spot one particular specimen, one of the rarest and most elusive in the world, the rest of the animal and natural context is no less important. It constitutes an ecosystem in perfect symbiosis with an immense and pure environment.
The narration by Sylvain Tesson (voiced by Paolo Cognetti in Italian) is of such delicacy that it repeatedly tightens the heart, so much so that the mere thought of possibly disturbing or harming the creatures annihilates and frightens, but The Snow Leopard is a work of pure peace and reconciliation. With very important thoughts but devoid of negativity, death, pain. And, for this reason, propelled and accompanied by the authentically celestial notes of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (which at times even echo the best Dirty Three), the tears flow like a river, the emotion is as immense as the awe before the timeless Tibetan landscapes. Also due to the awareness of what has been interrupted over the course of History and evolution: the Harmony, the order, the balance that persists instead in nature, where man cannot cause harm.
This documentary film is itself a gift, one of the most beautiful things one could ever witness. Far from both the patina and the stereotypical nomadism of Into the Wild and the signs of recklessness and madness of Timothy Treadwell's tragic parable, recounted by Herzog in Grizzly Man.
More than anything, La Panthere des Nieges shows the pursuit of an escape to a place that seems eternal and cyclical, immune to the passage of progress and the dissolution it entails. Awaiting the passage of a white panther, a bear, a fox, or a Tibetan antelope.
We are not alone
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