"Travelers and Magicians" is the first feature film ever made in the Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan. Its Bhutanese director, Khyentse Norbu, s a very esteemed reincarnated lama who studied film-making in London and was a consultant for Bernardo Bertolucci's movie "Little Buddha." His first movie, "The Cup," filmed in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal was based on his own experiences as a youngster in a Buddhist monastery. It became an international hit. The bemused observation of the interplay of traditional culture and interest in globalized culture is not quite as central to T&M as it was to "The Cup," but is an important aspect.
The film starts with a young official named Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), a city-dweller recently assigned to a village, who is eager to go to America to make money. He has a boom box and posters on the wall of that faraway media-projecting place, and avers that he would rather pick apples as a migrant farmworker in America than be a respected official in Bhutan. He has been waiting for a letter from a friend who went to America. After it arrives, he receives permission to go to a Buddhist festival in Thimphu (the capital) to meet his emigre friend, intending never to return to his post.
Dondup is delayed by his boss and by a woman who gives him dried cheese for his journey, and just misses the bus. There are very few vehicles on the road and Dondup is joined first by a man transporting apples to market and then by an itinerant monk (Sonam Kinga), who turns out to be quite a story-teller.
The three men get a ride in the back of a truck with a friendly drunk already on board. An older man rice-paper maker and his 19-year-old daughter just out of school in the city (Sonam Lhamo) join the entourage. The monk is amused at how smitten by her Dondup is, and she is enraptured by the story the monk is telling about a restless student named Tashi (Lhakpa Dorji) at a magic school who gets lost and finds a house far off in the forest, where a young woman, Deki (Deki Yangzom), cooks and weaves for a suspicious old man, Agay, who has isolated them to avoid competition for his beautiful young bride and is none too pleased to have an attractive younger man show up in a storm.
Tashi has something of the same mixture of ennui and restlessness at home that Dondup had, though the old man with the young woman who attracts Dondup is daughter rather than wife, so a licit match (should he decide to go back to his post).
I should mention that besides having awe-inspiring Himalayan scenery, Bhutan seems to have a lot of spectacular weather. Clouds and lightning and red morning sun hitting the peaks, etc. The cinematography of Alan Kozlowski is extraordinary, even if it is true that it is "impossible to take a bad picture in Bhutan."
The pace is a trifle slow for those used to Hollywood blockbusters with violence of one sort or another every few minutes. There is violence and rivalry, lust and jealousy in the primeval-seeming Buddhist country, too, though no buildings nor vehicles blow up in T&M. The sex ratio of the triangle in the story-within-a-story is different from that in Shindo Kaneto's (1964) Onibaba, and T&M is shot in color, but that story has some of the elementary brutality of 's film. Perhaps, one could say that the inner story is a Bhutanese The Postman Always Rings Twice, with a less genial husband than Cecil Kellaway , but similar heat generated between the young wife and the itinerant who lands on the doorstep (Lana Turner and John Garfield in the 1946 adaptation).
Although it hardly seems possible, the story within a story is even more beautifully shot than the present-day road movie. The visual transfer of the entire movie to DVD is superlative, and the original includes some heavy color-filtered scenes (one in particular that seems particularly Japanese to me with a blueish-faced woman in an eye-poppingly red dress appears twice in the making-of feature).
The making-of feature is also outstanding, helped by the Bhutan scenery, by the novelty of making a feature film in Bhutan, by finding out who the "actors" are (none of them had been actors before involvement in the movie), and by learning of the background of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche (Norbu), how he came to film-making, how high his status is in the Bhutan Buddhist hierarchy, and what he wanted to show of conflicts of old and postmodern in contemporary Bhutan. There is footage from both his movies and some from a European film festival (I think Venice, but maybe it was Cannes).
The DVD also includes a fairly lengthy and very good theatrical trailer, production stills, and a trailer for what looks to be a wild movie, "Shortcut to Nirvana). The booklet (which I have not seen) also has a print interview of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche.
My local paper's reviewer Carla Meyer, wrote about the cast so well that I just want to quote her rather than reinvent this particular wheel:
"A broadcaster by profession, Dendup embodies a man who is somewhat sophisticated yet still respectful of his nation's gentle order. Kinga, an author of books about Bhutan, radiates inner peace and good humor as the monk. Yangzom and Dorji, a Bhutanese civil servant and TV news producer, respectively, share dazzling chemistry. These two were always movie stars. They just needed to be discovered."
My sentiments exactly! The boy who plays Tashi's younger brother is also a movie "natural."
Four of the main actors and Dorbu are surprisingly fluent in English on the making-of feature. The movie dialogue is in Dzongkha.
I realize that not everyone is as fascinated by central Asian cultures as I am, but I think that the movie's charm would work on most anyone who gave this subtitled movie without any brand-name stars a chance (and had a little patience--after all, much of the movie is about waiting for rides that are slow to come!).
© 2006, Stephen O. Murray
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