‘The Velvet Queen’ Review: A Lyrical Nature Documentary More Concerned With Soulfulness Than Spectacle
Guy Lodge Film CriticA svelte, slinky figure in spotted silvery blond, the snow leopard is one of the great haughty glamazons of the animal kingdom — a status suitably acknowledged in the English-language title of “The Velvet Queen,” French docmaker Marie Amiguet’s lovely, unexpected screen ode to the little-seen feline. (The original French title is the rather more prosaic “La panthère des neiges.”) Yet if the title implies the naturalist’s equivalent of diva worship, the film’s approach surprises us, fixating less on the furry dazzle of the snow leopard in her natural Tibetan habitat than on the very act of looking at nature in the first place.