E-Mail This Article to a Friend Camel unfiltered Plus critical changes at the Times BY GERALD PEARY

Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni met at film school in Munich, where Davaa, who’s from Mongolia, told Falorni, who’s from Italy, a sad story of what sometimes happens in her native country: a mother camel rejecting her colt. Inspired, Falorni accompanied Davaa to Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, where they looked to capture on celluloid what Davaa had described. They made friends with an extended family of nomads who owned a flock of camels and whom they filmed "being themselves," Nanook of the North–style. Each March in Mongolia, as if on cue, camels give birth. In the spring of 2002, the filmmakers got exactly what they’d hoped for, and it became the basis for The Story of the Weeping Camel, which is opening at the Kendall Square and the Coolidge Corner.

Brace yourself for an emotional, heart-wrenching movie evening. One of the most forlorn, depressing sounds you will ever hear is a baby camel howling in the night because his mother won’t have anything to do with him. Poor, poor Botok, the sweet, white-haired colt whose brown-haired mama, Ingen Temee, knees him when he tries to suckle, races away when he comes for a snuggle. Yes, it’s the most primal of scenes, and who watching won’t feel some stirring of Oedipal separation anxiety at Botok’s plight?

Without being heavy-handed, Davaa and Falorni place the frustrations of Botok in a context of maternal nurturing everywhere about him. A neighboring camel who also recently gave birth allows her offspring to rub against her hump. An old lady sings to a lamb. The women of the nomad family lift bawling infants into their comforting arms. Poor, poor Botok.

There’s a potential native cure, music said to soothe the two-humped beast. The nomad children — stone-faced teenager Dude and his animated, energetic younger brother, Ugna — ride camels into town to seek help from a professional violinist. Here’s a slight but diverting subplot, with the boys away from their family yert and excited to be in "civilization." They buy radio batteries at an open market; they visit a school. And Ugna discovers the marvels of watching TV.

Back at the yert: a bona fide miracle takes place before the camera. Who needs the Passion According to Mel when you can witness the angry, barking Ingen Temee calmed by a stringed musical instrument hung from one of her humps? And then the singing comes (almost a Gobi delta blues), with a plaintive refrain on the two-stringed instrument. Will Ingen Temee be moved to big, plopping camel tears? Will little Botok savor his mother’s milk at last? I yawned when E.T. went home; I felt damned annoyed by the piano-playing triumph at the end of Shine and when the girls sighted their soccer star in the finale of Bend It like Beckham. But for The Story of the Weeping Camel, I’m a believer!

WHERE THERE WERE THREE, now there are only two. The New York Times recently ended its five-year experiment of offering a trio of revolving film critics — A.O. Scott, Elvis Mitchell, Stephen Holden — by appointing Scott as the Times’ chief critic. That was probably okay with Holden, a Times veteran who had served loyally below Janet Maslin, the first-string film reviewer through the 1990s. But Mitchell, unhappy at being passed over, bolted the newspaper.

The shift became clear at Cannes last month when Mitchell, a regular tuxedo’d figure there, didn’t show up. Some of my fellow American film critics gloated over his disappearance from the Times pages, dismissing his reviews as erratic, pop, and fizzy. With his Rastafarian locks and big cigar, he was viewed, I think, as too public and extroverted a personality for our nervous, inward-looking profession. Wasn’t he too comfortable appearing on TV? And how did he have time for those other gigs: panels at film festivals, commuting this year to teach at Harvard?

My feeling is that Mitchell is a more talented, imaginative writer than others are willing to concede. Even a Times critic can be underrated. With his departure, the list of African-American film reviewers shrinks even further: Wesley Morris at the Globe, Armond White at the New York Press, Lisa Kennedy at the Denver Post.

On the other hand, the Times was totally correct in making Scott its chief critic. He’s a wry stylist, an uncompromising thinker who is skeptical of both Hollywood super-products and sentimental middlebrow art movies. "Tony" Scott could be, over time, the greatest New York Times critic of them all. Moreover, he’s a very nice guy, modest and soft-spoken. Congratulations!