Kundun (1997)

The Dalai Lama, A Reverential View

"Kundun" is an enlightening, affecting experience giving viewers insights into the early life of the Dalai Lama. He was chosen from an ordinary family and was given a few simple tests to see whether there was a spiritual connection between him and the thirteenth Dalai Lama who had passed. (From assorted objects did he gravitate toward those belonging to the late Dalai Lama?) He became the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lamas, the spiritual and political leader of Tibet and for the Tibetan people, a living god in the Tibetan Buddhist creed.
Martin Scorcese, filming in Morocco, has made a devotional work, an authentic-looking piece with a brilliant depiction of the colorful vestments and garments worn by the monks, a sense of place in Lhasa, the capital, and the recreation of the pageantry, the rituals and rites practiced in Lamaism. One scene shows the funeral ceremony of a dead body left outside to be picked over by vultures as in the Parsi religion.
The film shows the boy struggling to learn his duties and later coming to grips with the toughest decisions he has to make when Tibet is brutally taken over by China. Forced to flee to India in 1959 at age twenty-four, we leave him wistfully looking over the mountains to his lost country.
He is presented as a quiet, humble, meditative pacifist. He knows in his meeting with Mao that China, which has forsaken religion, will never let Tibet be free. The Dalai Lama represents unconditional love. He is the compassionate Buddha, a monk and a head of state who has to be Kundun, the Presence.
The movie is inspiring, a learning experience done with all the wizardry a gifted director can muster. I was deeply involved in the movie because it presented the life of the Dalai Lama in a compelling way. You need not be a believer to become a captive while viewing this movie.
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a romantic vision

The movie is a masterpiece concerning photography, design, scenery, etc. , But a bit too much romantic point of view of the old Tibet and the Tibetan Buddhism.

This is a nice movie to enjoy, but if you are really interrested in the biography and the real facts,I really advise to do your own researches concerning the facts which are described in the movie.

June 30, 2008

Beautiful

Underneath the beautiful art direction, costume design and great soundtrack lies a great film. I feel the director did a magnificent job creating the feelings and motivations of a boy growing up in very unusual circumstances. May 25, 2008

Great movie

This movie is a masterpiece. It touches you on so many different levels. It certaily is not required that you be Buddhist to enjoy this film. It is funny and heart wrenching. A very sad and yet hopeful telling of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama's life from 1937-1959 when he fled Tibet for his saftey and to safe his country from communisum and Chairman Mao. It is one of the most memorable films that I have ever seen. I have watched it countless times and have shown it to many friends and family members. It is certaily a movie that needs to be in everyones DVD Library. May 5, 2008

Flawed, but beautiful and undeniably important

Martin Scorsese has created a visually stunning, mostly-accurate but otherwise extremely hagiographical view of the life of the Dalai Lama when he was discovered to be the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama to his flight from Tibet in 1959. Only one scene takes place in India and a few take place in China, though I am to understand that it was shot almost entirely in Morocco. Of course no movie can be filmed about the Dalai Lama in Chinese-controlled Tibet, but Scorsese manages to recreate the rich mountain landscape through brilliant splicing with the Moroccan sets. Philip Glass's score, which mixes orchestra music with Tibetan chants, creates a passionate effect. I confess I always get a little choked up at the end, when the young Dalai Lama approaches the Tibetan-Indian border and takes his final steps out of his homeland, then looks back on the mountain range he is forbidden to return to.

The movie's main weakness is pacing. The early scenes of the Dalai Lama's childhood are touching, the views of rural Amdo (now a Chinese province and not part of the autonomous region of Tibet) and feudal Lhasa area a portrait of a life that is gone, and very reminiscent of the movie "The Last Emperor." After age 12, the movie jumps ahead to age 16 and the invasion of the Chinese, and becomes a complex political story of mediation, disappointment, and disaster. It runs about half an hour too long, though the last 10 minutes will stay with you for a long time.

Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong plays the adult Dalai Lama (age 16 and on), and has been criticized for his acting, as he is often passive and lifeless and not resembling the real Dalai Lama we know from speeches and public appearances, who is charismatic and smiling. Of course some of this is based on fact; the Dalai Lama is more serious when dealing with Tibetan politics than when addressing a University crowd, and he was going through a difficult time and faced with impossible political choices. Still, he doesn't liven up the screen, and the actors playing his real-life advisers (who match photographs of them very well) are still serious but more fascinating to watch as actors. The Dalai Lama at this age is overwhelmed by his political position, and the actor is overwhelmed by the role.

There are some historical inaccuracies, though to be fair, not many. The opening line on the screen about how Tibetan lamas had practiced non-violence for centuries isn't true; the movie contradicts it by showing the Regent's uprising when the Dalai Lama is 12, when Reting tried to unseat the current Regent with his army of monks. The lamaist state had an army, and used violence to protect the country and occasionally to suppress other strains of Buddhism. It's hard to open a film with a lie; I don't understand Scorsese's decision there.

The movie is accused of being a hagiography, but almost all of the significant events have been confirmed by several sources, from the Dalai Lama himself in his autobiography, to his mother's autobiography, to the official Tibetan state records, to photographic records, to his brother's autobiography. Several minor facts were changed for dramatic purpose: the 2-year-old Dalai Lama ran out to greet the disguised monk looking for him in real life, while in the movie it occurs later, in the house. The scene where the 4-year-old Dalai Lama finds and identifies his "old teeth" (dentures belonging to the 13th Dalai Lama) is confirmed in his mother's autobiography, though HH says on his website that he has no memory of it, but does not doubt that it happened.

Several key issues are not addressed. Heinrich Harrer, the Dalai Lama's childhood friend until he was 9, is absent from the film, either because of timing reasons or because Harrer was a Nazi in hiding. There is one image of a Tibetan slave in the film, who bows to the Dalai Lama, who prays for him. The man is not identified as a slave by the film; a viewer could assume he is a convict by his shackles. Scorsese does not shy away from portraying Tibet as a corrupt, backwards state that even the Dalai Lama admits to several times in the film and has admitted to in real life (he was very impressed with Mao Zedong until Mao said all religion was a poison, at which point the man regarded as a living Buddha probably thought they weren't seeing eye-to-eye). The Panchen Lama, who was very active in Tibetan politics at the time of the Chinese invasion, is completely absent from the film. (The current Panchen Lama is a political prisoner in China, so he couldn't be consulted) In the scene with Mao, only the Dalai Lama is present, but in historical photographs of the meeting, the Panchen Lama is there with him.

These quibbles are actually quite minor; the vast majority of the film is drawn from historical sources and stands up to the account of everyone who was there and lived to tell about it (except the Chinese gov't, which has banned the film). Much like "The Last Emperor," it captures a world that was lost to time and political change, and can never be seen again, except in this re-creation.

As the Dalai Lama says himself as he passes over the mountains that lead to India and his future exile, "All will become nothing. Just like a dream, whatever things I enjoy will become a memory. Whatever is past will not be seen again." Except, of course, on DVD. April 30, 2008

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