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Kundun is the latest "Dalaiwood" production to tell the story of Tibet's exiled spiritual leader.
BY DALE E. BASYE, dbasye@wweek.com
Fade in...A young Dalai Lama postures before a mirror, clad in ceremonial robes. "Are you prayin' to me?" he asks aloud, interrogating his own reflection. Looking from side to side, he adds with wild-eyed menace, "I don't seen any other temporal spiritual rulers around...Are you prayin' to me?!" Jump ahead three years to a private meeting in Beijing. A more mature, bespectacled Dalai Lama fidgets on a red velvet couch, seated next to an agitated Chairman Mao (Joe Pesci). As the two bristle against the subject of China's brutal occupation of Tibet, the veins in Mao's ample forehead throb. "It's Mao, you cocksucker, Mao!!" he yells, raging at the Dalai Lama for mangling the Chinese tyrant's name with his rural accent. "Rhymes with 'Ow!'" he screams in a reedy whine as he stabs the young spiritual leader viciously in the neck with a ball-point pen. Slow-motion shot from above as blood pools into the shape of the Wheel of Dharma. Cue spooky orchestra swell. Fade out. The marriage of director Martin Scorsese with the epic biography of the exiled Dalai Lama seems a strained union. But beneath the savage spasms of blood and anger spurting out of Raging Bull, GoodFellas and Taxi Driver are near-religious themes of moral struggles in a violent world. Scorsese, a former altar boy who once harbored priestly aspirations, has always been something of a lay theologian, his spiritual fascination resurrecting most dramatically with 1988's controversial Last Temptation of Christ. Protested vehemently by fundamentalists whose faith couldn't withstand the notion of Jesus as a conflicted, flesh-and-blood "man," the film presented the son of God as a heavy, almost gnostic apostate burdened by the obligations of his spiritual mission. Scorsese's personal attachments to Catholicism diffused the film's focus, though touches such as Christ's Brooklyn accent and Harvey Keitel as a Lower East Side Judas marked the myth with the director's inimitable signature. Kundun, on the other hand, is selfless and impersonal: a vital combination when striving for reverential, Zen authenticity, but disastrous when hoping to produce gripping cinema. This documentary-style look at the Dalai Lama's early years--his birth to a peasant family in 1935, his recognition as the reincarnated "Buddha of Compassion" at age 2, his escape to India at 24--is almost ascetic in its denial of its director's characteristic exchanges, electricity and brooding, operatic style. Its title taken from the Tibetan word for "presence," the film follows closely the Dalai Lama's autobiography, Freedom in Exile: In this true-life fairy tale, a poor, spirited boy found to be the divine stuff of greatness learns compassion, tolerance and patience through the rigorous demands of his destiny. But this fairy tale turns Grimm: The once-jubilant tot becomes a young man burdened with political crisis when his predecessor's predictions of bloodshed and destruction come true with Mao's Chinese massacre of Tibetans. Like the similarly themed Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun isn't overtly about faith nor about how single-mindedly "evil" the Chinese are. Unlike Seven Years, however, Scorsese's $28 million film makes no concessions to Hollywood conventions such as name stars (the film is cast entirely with Tibetan performers) or conventional storytelling. In fact, it's much easier to define the film by what it's not than what it actually is; as a Western filmmaker going East for answers, Scorsese has returned with nothing but a beautiful, well-intentioned question mark. "My enemies will be nothing. My friends will be nothing. All will be nothing," waxes the teen-age Dalai Lama at one pivotal point in Kundun. The trouble is, the concept of "nothingness," if mishandled, is mere boredom elevated by the passion of conviction. There's a scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) is talking on the phone while the camera tracks away down a long, empty hallway. It illustrates perfectly, with one deft stroke, Bickle's isolation and loneliness. But loneliness and solitude are two entirely different states of being. It is far easier to show what is lacking from one's life than it is to show the spiritual satisfaction in having nothing. Scorsese comes closest to projecting cinematic "mindfulness" in Kundun's first half, where the precocious young lama experiences the world as a collage of sensory perceptions. We awaken as the curious boy does, viewing the world in sleepy still lifes of his family conversing in predawn calm, shuffling their sandled feet off to a full day of rural struggle. Later, the boy burrows into the enveloping serenity of a monk's robe and we again see the world through his eyes: a child too young to fully fathom his mission on earth of showing "love to all living things." These subjective glimpses not only put us into the consciousness of a young boy thrust into a holy destiny, but also into the consciousness of a country viewing a chaotic world with spiritual detachment. These early moments, unfurling with an enchanting paucity of dialogue, plant symbolic seeds that sprout in the darker soil to come. After enduring a steady stream of Mao Zedong's Communist agitprop, the solemn teen looks down at the general's shiny leather shoes with dread. How could a man with wing tips like polished tanks understand the humble Tibetans, shuffling about their country in sandals? When the Dalai Lama crosses into India to become one of history's most famous expatriates, he looks back to see an imaginary team of blood-stained horses. This isn't just a surreal Salvador "Dalai" moment, but the world as it appears to him at the time: He knows instantly the fate awaiting his dutiful bodyguards upon their return to Tibet. Music has always loomed large in Scorsese's celluloid liturgies. Bernard Herrmann's clammy horn squalls and grimy pools of orchestral noir pushed Taxi Driver's claustrophobic menace to the breaking point (for an added note of integrity, he died the night he finished the score). Likewise, Philip Glass' frail, synthesizer fugues create a hypnotic texture of incantatory restraint in Kundun. The music defies the linear chug of the narrative, using a slow build of recurring themes to provide an aural topography of the story. The soulful, pacifist spell that weds Scorsese's visual eloquence with Glass' mournful musical underlay is broken by a feeble script written by Melissa Mathison (Mrs. Harrison Ford). Lyrical images--the Dalai Lama surrounded by a sea of slaughtered monks, the ritual creation and obliteration of vibrant sand mandalas--are far stronger poetry than Mathison's clumsy words. Exploiting the current Tibet chic, the Dalai Lama proves smarter than your conventional martyr: When political channels give you nothing but static, try television channels...or glossy magazine spreads...or even movies to get your message across. So a remote culture is forced to sell its isolation in a desperate move to save itself, marketing the charisma of its spiritual leader to draw attention to the Chinese occupation that has left Tibet without a single practicing monk. Perhaps the relationship between Hollywood and Tibet can be understood through the following Buddhist parable: "Once there lived a wealthy man whose house caught on fire. The man was away from home and when he came back, he found that his children were so absorbed in play, they had not noticed the fire and were still inside the house. The father screamed, 'Get out, children! Come out of the house! Hurry!' But the children did not heed him. The anxious father shouted again. 'Children, I have some wonderful toys here. Come out of the house and get them!' Heeding his cry this time, the children ran out of the burning house." Is Hollywood Tibet's shiny toy, used to lure Western culture into "the light," or is Tibet itself simply Hollywood's latest bauble, meant to trick the world at large into thinking it has some kind of soul? Can a film capture accurately the practice of non-attachment and still make some kind of emotional connection with a mass audience? These are the conundrums of Kundun. With Tibetans now a minority in their homeland, Tibetan culture has become more a state of mind than one contained physically by borders. Wide-eyed enchantment is useless; what Tibet really needs is practical action. Though earnest and masterfully constructed, Kundun ends up being a deep meditation that only grazes enlightenment. Scorsese does his best work in the city that never sleeps--not with material that struggles to stay awake. At least he still has two years to make the best picture of the '90s. |
