Is this Aussie film set in Mongolia a giant leap or a small steppe?
★★★
While Berlin-based Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady is currently developing her first fully fictional feature, The Wolves Always Come At Night marks her second foray into what she calls 'docu-feature', a hybrid storytelling form that merges observational documentary with elements of fiction, driven by the subjects of the film.
Her first was Island of the Hungry Ghosts, which was set on Christmas Island and used the visually arresting annual migration of land crabs as a metaphor for the journeys of asylum seekers across the world. A counsellor called Poh Lin Lee served as a kind of focal point in that movie, helping give individual human shape to stories of mass movement.
Lee is involved in the new film too, credited as 'narrative therapy consultant'. Also returning is Aaron Cupples, whose work on the ethereal land- and windscape-inspired score is just as impressive as it was on the earlier film, and cinematographer Michael Latham, whose images are once again stunning.
Set in Mongolia, The Wolves… focuses on the hard-scrabble existence of goat herder Davaa (Davaasuren Dagvasuren) and his wife Zaya (Otgonzaya Dashzeveg). They are raising four young kids in their ger (circular tent), surrounded by animals and occasionally interacting with neighbours in a far-off community hall, where the conversation revolves around the weather and the birthing of livestock. 'How has your spring been?' 'Good.' That sort of thing.
The first shot of Davaa is on horseback, riding hard across the Gobi desert on his stocky pony. The film ends with him and his horse together again. But in between, it's all about the forces that are moving man and beast apart – motorisation, urbanisation, exploitation of the land for minerals, and above all, climate change.
Davaa and Zaya are stoic presences, not given to great slabs of articulation, and not especially expressive. Dagvasuren and Dashzeveg are credited as co-writers here, but I hope they weren't paid by the word.
To be frank, not a lot happens in The Wolves… If you were feeling mean-spirited, you might say it is exactly the sort of film Marg Downey so brilliantly sent up on Fast Forward 30-plus years ago as 'the SBS woman'.
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