Something to watch tonight: Thursday 25 July

Kundun (Scorsese, 1997)

There was a news story from the BBC recently fea­tur­ing an asser­tion from the man­aging dir­ect­or of retail­er HMV that “More shop­pers are buy­ing Blu-Ray and DVDs of movies and TV shows des­pite the rise in stream­ing platforms”.

This is good news for those of that still col­lect the damn things. I’ll still be able to get my fix for a while longer.

The growth has largely come from col­lect­ors like me who want to be sure that a film they love will always be access­ible to them, because stream­ing ser­vices are notori­ously unre­li­able about main­tain­ing their collections.

But also, you get to own a beau­ti­ful object like this one from Australian boutique pro­vider, ViaVision’s Imprint imprint:

I had rewatched The Last Temptation of Christ rel­at­ively recently (Criterion Blu-ray) so I jumped in with Kundun, a film I hadn’t seen since it played the 1997 New Zealand International Film Festival.

Back then audi­ences were mostly aston­ished at the fact of its exist­ence rather than enga­ging too hard with the con­tent, I think. Scorsese was still best known for viol­ent gang­ster pic­tures like Goodfellas and even in the ‘mak­ing of’ doc­u­ment­ary on the extras disc here you can tell he is as sur­prised to be mak­ing the film as anyone.

From this dis­tance, though, the sur­prise is how straight the film is. The story of the early years of the 14^th Dalai Lama – from being dis­covered in the remote Amdo region of Tibet to his per­il­ous escape from the Chinese occu­pi­ers of his coun­try in 1959 – at the age of only 22 plays like a clas­sic (but classy) biopic.

Made with the coöper­a­tion of the Buddha of Compassion him­self, there are few of Scorsese’s usu­al visu­al flour­ishes – an early shot has the cam­era tilted at 90 degrees before straight­en­ing up – and a con­cen­tra­tion on find­ing truth in the per­form­ances from the almost entirely non-professional cast. In that he suc­ceeds admirably.

Of its many qual­it­ies, its meditative-ness is aided by a typ­ic­ally hyp­not­ic Philip Glass score.

Unable, for polit­ic­al reas­ons, to shoot in Tibet (or even India, where the Lama has his res­id­ence) Scorsese went to Morocco where he had made Last Temptation and design­er Dante Ferretti and cine­ma­to­graph­er Roger Deakins set about recre­at­ing the Himalayas with the help of old fash­ioned matte paint­ings. The cast of Tibetans were impor­ted espe­cially for the shoot and many were actu­ally related to the people they were por­tray­ing – the act­or play­ing the Lama’s moth­er (Tencho Gyalpo) is actu­ally his niece.

Kundun has a repu­ta­tion now for being a film that Disney fun­ded and then bur­ied after protests from the Chinese gov­ern­ment who they were attempt­ing to woo for theme park reas­ons. It cer­tainly was hard to find on home video for a long while. But fur­ther dig­ging reveals that Disney (Touchstone) only had North American rights. In Australia and New Zealand, the indie NewVision released it and it was a big suc­cess – the second biggest film of the year in Australia, in fact.

Is it a film of faith? Scorsese is fam­ously Catholic so you’d think he might not have too much time for Tibetan Buddhism, but he takes all the art­icles of the Lama’s faith at face value and presents a power­fully uncyn­ic­al por­trait of a man strug­gling to come to terms with his remark­able des­tiny. He is clearly moved by this char­ac­ter and his devo­tion to his faith and to his people

The story starts so long ago – the Dalai Lama was dis­covered in 1937 – that I thought for a long time that it was a film about a dif­fer­ent Dalai Lama to the one that traveled the world meet­ing politi­cians and hold­ing ral­lies but, sure enough, it is he. It’s just that he is now 89 years old – exiled from his home and people for 65 years – and as the cred­its rolled the editor-in-chief and I asked each oth­er how might the next Dalai Lama be found?

Where to watch Kundun

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Not avail­able to stream anywhere.

Further reading

Not one of mine today, but an excel­lent guide to some­thing that can both­er me in movies if handled poorly – A Smartphone Can’t Help You Now: How Horror Movies Solve Their Cell Problem (Rich Juzwiak in New York Times)