Archive for September 2009
The Search: Review and Commentary
Pema Tseden’s second full-length movie, the Search, is a movie that says so many things without saying much at all. It is an exercise in patience, a reward of which at the end leaves you not satisfied but mildly contemplative. Much like the uncompromising cinematography, what lies beneath the seemingly unassuming surface reveals an honest and complex understanding of a country and a generation trying to find its place in an unfamiliar environment.
A person of modest build with a soft-spoken demeanour, Pema Tseden introduced the movie to this year’s TIFF viewers by saying that he wanted to present his homeland to a different audience by participating in the festival. The portrayal of Tibet in a different light is also unmistakably significant.
The film is set in the Amdo region of Tibet. A crew of four men — director, cameraman, businessman and driver — are scouting the villages in search of actors to play a movie based on a traditional Tibetan opera called “Namthar”. They are an easy-going bunch that crack each other up in their long drives through extremely rural areas and sleepy town centres. They all speak in their native Amdo dialect. Everyone in the movie, in fact, speaks in this dialect.
The story picks up after they encounter a mysterious woman in a village who used to play the lead female character “Mande Zangmo” of the opera. Just her singing one verse is enough to convince the party that she is the one meant for this role. She refuses to show her face though, which is clad in a pink scarf throughout the movie. She also refuses to join their project, relenting only when they agree to seek her ex-boyfriend who used to play the lead male, “Prince Drime Kunden”. He left her after he got a teaching job in the city, and it appears that this girl has some unfinished business to settle with him. She joins the group, and the rest of the movie is of them going to various places and meeting all sorts of people, all in their quest to fill out the roles for their movie adaptation.
The first thing to commend about this movie is the fact that it is authentic to the core. Being a Tibetan with a good enough grasp of Tibetan, even I found it difficult to follow the movie without reading the English subtitles. The opening credits and titles are all written in Tibetan. Everyone in the movie is Tibetan and almost all of them are non-actors. Mr. Tseden has a wonderful knack of letting the players define the story without making it forced or ham-fisted. Everything seems to blend and flow organically, from the pleasing and percussive sound of the Amdo dialect to the measured pace and spartan effects of the movie.
Zonthar Gyal, the cinematographer, maintains a sure-footed balance between the expansive and the intimate. The villages are sparsely populated, the towns are unevenly developed, herds of yaks and goats share the concrete roadways with honking cars and trucks. The villages look like they are from another epoch, yet they are not idyllic. The dust and mist are often dream-like, and the search, although purposeful and determined, is neither rushed nor languid with these kinds of peculiar metronomes.
Sometimes a single continuous shot is set for almost unbearably long. This stark change in pace from snappy edits in the youtube era makes for an unsettling viewing experience, where not a lot is happening in the screen in front of me and yet I am hooked and perturbed, all at the same time.
The people are weather-beaten and guarded, yet they also possess an easy smile, a sense of community and a desire of showmanship. In one scene, a bunch of novice monks, clearly aware of the fact that they are being taped, are asked to audition for parts in the movie. In the span of a few minutes, these kids who are no older than ten pronounce advanced verses of dialectics and existential philosophy. And they do it all with a mischievous grin.
Such moments of light-heartedness are few and far between. The complete lack of any soundtrack, with the exception of the crew’s music playing the car, creates a heavy and almost stuffy atmosphere. The aforementioned drawn out scenes together collude into a viewing experience that sometimes made me gasp for air in the packed theatre.
There were some parts which I felt were unnecessary and could have been cut, but then I am left with the sinking reflection of a time and place where most of us demand to be dazzled, shocked, humoured, and generally led to feel a certain way when watching different parts of a movie. Rarely do you experience a state of introspection along with the movie, right in the middle of the theatre. Some may call it ennui. I think it’s something more than that. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire, called it one of the most challenging movies he saw at the Shanghai Int’l Fim Festival, where the Search won the top jury prize. I agree with that sentiment.
The Search ends in almost the same way that it began. The audience quietly files out of the movie. The jarring noise of the cineplex outside confronts my senses with an audacity that confirms my belief about the director’s vision and inspiration. The questions that the movie raises echo long after the credits have rolled.
A note (please be aware of possible spoilers):
It seems, unfortunately, that most movies about Tibet are lumped into two extremities: either they are a politically charged study of China’s occupation and its effects, in Tibet or beyond; or they are a propaganda tool for legitimizing the oppressor’s occupation. Case in point, Tibettruth:
…the new offering from Tibetan Director Pema Tseden, of course being an obedient and loyal citizen of communist China he also has a Chinese name too, Wanma Caidan. A slick production filmed in Amdo, Eastern Tibet, superficially it presents a quest to find Tibetans who can perform traditional Tibetan opera, seems that none were available, thus we are left to conclude that the old ways in Tibet are undergoing change, life is moving on, with the underlying implication that this is a good thing. What the film does not address of course is the fact that such change has been forced upon ordinary Tibetans, and that the loss of cultural knowledge is a direct result of China’s imperialistic aggression which has deliberately targeted Tibetan culture for over five decades.
First, let us examine the last sentence of the paragraph above. Done? Let’s move on.
Is it too much to ask to check your tone before knowing who or what you are talking about? The above post from a Tibetan pro-independence blog is cynical and vindictive, and completely unfounded given the fact that the author didn’t even bother to watch the movie, and doesn’t know who or what the director is about (loyal citizen of Communist China, seriously?).
We talk about facts all the time, and we have to given the dire circumstance in Tibet, but one thing that I’ve come to loathe about some of the activists is their unyielding insistence of painting Tibetans as one-note characters. We are refugees, and that is that. In their world, Tibetans barely qualify as individuals or artists with their own ideas of what Tibet means to them.
It goes along the lines of religious zealots and ideologues: you are either with us or you’re against us.
In their minds, every Tibetan must be naked about their suffering. What gets misinterpreted and misunderstood in the shuffle of the reality of a complex life is a failure of advocating for Tibet’s independence, and therefore we are shills for the Chinese occupation.
Getting emotional is understandable, but it is unfortunate when it comes at the price of appreciating and supporting the aspects of our community that should make us proud. Mr. Pema Tseden, who was born in Tibet to a family of farmers, knows as much, and probably more (experience or otherwise), about the dire situation of Tibet.
His work is an honest and poetic look at the way the occupation has altered the landscape in Tibet. Though the premise of the movie isn’t based explicitly on this, it is implied through many instances. There is a scene at the beginning where the crew tries to get a little boy to relay a message to a member of the village. At each request, they hand him a pen or some money as thanks, always advising the kid to study properly.
In another scene, the director and crew look on as a group of Tibetan girls perform a bland dance routine using butter churns as props in an audition for the movie. At the end of it, clearly unimpressed and slightly disappointed, the director asks them to recite some Tibetan poetry. None of them make the cut.
The story of Prince Drime Kunden itself can be interpreted as a metaphor for Tibet, Tibetans or His Holiness. The story of how he sacrifices his children and his eyes to the three Indian sages is a heartbreaking rendition of Tibet’s history, and of course, none of this should mean anything to those of us who are the actual victims of China’s occupation, but it also doesn’t mean that an artist can’t explore it through those lenses.
And what of the fact that this was all made in Tibetan, in the local Amdo dialect? The director told us that the shooting of the film itself took just around fifty days, but to actually get it approved and distributed took him over three years. This kind of perseverance and belief is something that we must applaud. For even in the fairly straightforward argument that the Tibetan language must be preserved and promoted in Tibet, Mr. Tseden shows how it can be done in a profound and meaningful tapestry.
So let’s back off the vitriol, watch the movie and offer substantive points before leaping on to conclusions about people who have as much right to talk about Tibet as you and I.
