Yakedy-Yak: Trading Salt for Grain

Now, don't get me wrong about the yaks. I believe that more yak movies would be a great thing. Those wooly, horned beasts of burden look a lot stranger than anything George Lucas has cooked up since the Taun Tauns, and I could watch them lumber down mountain inclines for hours.

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Incidentally, watching strange creatures and showing off exotic lands is precisely what director Eric Valli had in mind. Valli is a documentary filmmaker and photographer for National Geographic, and it shows. Himalaya is beautiful to behold, a guided tour through the culture of Nepal and the everyday lives of people from some of the remotest areas left on the planet: the Dolpo region is about as "world film" as it gets, and Valli does a predictably gorgeous job with the material. Vultures circle overhead, prayer flags beat in the wind, monks paint marvelous murals - and yaks, yaks, and more yaks.

What bothered me about Himalaya is that it's supposedly a Nepalese film -- but only the actors and the scenery actually are of that nationality. The rest of the production team is from France, Switzerland and England. As a result of their tourist's point of view, I could never shake the feeling of being on the outside looking in. Valli goes at great lengths to include as many aspects of Nepalese culture as possible, to the point where the procession of rites and rituals felt educational and staged.

And in spite of all the good intentions (or because of them), the story suffers. After the cinematography and documentary aspects, the plot clearly came third on the director's list. It involves an annual salt trek across the mountains, a stubborn chieftain, a sultry widow, her precocious son, and a rebellious young yak herder. The trust of the tribe has to be won, sudden snowstorms have to be endured, and treacherous shortcuts must be braved. It's the kind of formula plot that could as well have been fit into a movie about Irish shepherds or Dodge City cowboys.

International cinema lets you glimpse other worlds stranger than any science fiction movie can imagine and look at societies completely alien to our own. But films from elsewhere also often tell strange stories in surprising ways because filmmaking and storytelling follow different conventions. Himalaya shows the proud and beautiful people of Nepal in their natural habitat - but it doesn't let its heroes tell their own stories. The result is as pretty to look at, as instructive, and as emotionally uninvolving as a coffee table book.