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 14th 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 cooperation 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?

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Where to watch Kundun