TWO HANDS CLAPPING
The minds of human beings are so convoluted. What we hoped for yesterday, we dread today." So says the Monk (Sonam Kinga), a laid-back, lute-strumming shaman in Travellers and Magicians. This fable from Bhutan is so beguiling that it's sure to be backhandedly dismissed as a sweet, exotic diversion. It shouldn't be. Bhutanese writer-director Khyenstse Norbu (The Cup), a New York-trained independent filmmaker and incarnate llama, is a true populist storyteller who thinks simultaneously about surfaces and depths.
Travellers centers on a small-town government officer named Dondup Tsewang Dandup, a longhaired outsider whose obsession with industrialized mass culture (pop music, athletic shoes, sexy pinups) places him at odds with his more traditional, parochial neighbors. One day, Dondup tires of rural stasis, packs up his stuff and heads down the road on foot, hoping to catch a bus to the nearest major city and then make his way to America. He misses the bus, but instead of returning to his village, he waits by the side of the road in hopes of hitching a ride. He is soon joined by four other pedestrians-an elderly apple seller (Ap Dochu), the smiling, red-robed Monk, a widowed rice paper manufacturer (Dasho Adab Sangye) and his lovely daughter, Sonam (Sonam Lhamo), a student who couldn't get into a state university because her grades weren't good enough.
Norbu takes time assembling this motley crew, earning laughs from super-long, Beckett-like pauses, scored only with rustling wind and cawing birds. Every new traveler who joins Dondup by the roadside lessens his chances of hitching a ride and reminds him of why he wants to get out of this backwater. Here, as elsewhere in the film, Norbu and cinematographer Alan Kozlowski dust off one of modern cinema's least popular units of storytelling grammar, the extreme long shot, and puts it to brilliant use, intensifying droll exchanges and reducing his pilgrims to flyspecks against the deep green mountains. Norbu's long shots aren't just elegantly composed and funny, by squashing humans into the lower fifth of the frame, they suggest how geography merges with culture and oppresses self-styled "outsiders."
To pass the time-and to provoke and educate the cranky Dondup-the Monk tells the story of Tashi (Lhakpa Dorji), a magic student and girl-crazy teen who ingests his kid brother's home-brewed wine, impulsively hops on a horse and takes off into the deepest recesses of the forest. Hopelessly lost, Tashi discovers a remote cabin inhabited by an old man named Agay (Gomchen Penjore) and his ravishing but lonely young wife, Deki (Deki Yangzom). Tashi stays in the cabin, supposedly to help the old man, bur really to get closer to Deki, whose dutiful façade hides deep restlessness and untapped reserves of sexual power. (Here, Norbu's fusion of film noir and color-coded fable recalls Zhang Yimou's early masterwork Ju Dou.) The old man eventually reveals why he's chosen to live in the forest instead of in a city or town: because he fears some young buck might steal his wife away. "We may grow old," he tells Tashi, "but our minds don't age. Our jealousy stays young."
The story of Tashi contains many Ozu-like inserts (including a very funny cut from a sly, seductive proposal to a close-up of bees buzzing around a flower) and some stunning rack-focuses that express the young man's dawning realization that he's being drawn into a sexual trap. (The most unnerving of these creeps through layers of foreground grass, finally locating the lovers plotting in a field.) If Travellers had stuck with Dondup's story, it might have still been a memorable comedy about an outsider trying to separate himself from the entanglements of culture and history. But Norbu's decision to cut between Dondup's progress and the more dreamlike tale of Tashi lets him express the same ideas in a more poetic way.
Unlike most films that adopt a bracketed or crosscut structure, Travellers never flirts with redundancy. The film is filled with rhymed characters, compositions, actions and sounds-Tashi's horse poetically matches up with the rickety truck that carries Dondup and his fellow travelers; at various points, both men unknowingly express their desire for liberation (cultural and sexual) by stoking fires-but the rhymes are purposefully inexact, which opens them to interpretation and personal (private) identification. Tashi, for instance, is a student of magic whose journey is sparked by ingesting his brother's wine (essentially a potion); Dondup is a student of Western pop culture, which exerts its own spell and prompts him to forsake his hometown for the open road. Dondup's fixation on modern, secular, industrialized Western society comes at the expense of his own rural hometown, which is being threatened by invasive cultural forces, from the British-imported game of cricket (which is displacing archery as the preferred local sport) to industrialization itself, a seductive force that cripples small towns by luring young rural people to the cities. Dondup's modern distress is echoed in the Monk's tale, which centers on a young man who's receiving a culturally crucial education but would rather think about girls, and who impulsively abandons his studies and falls for a woman who at first seems a damsel in distress but might be a femme fatale.
The effect reminded me of Stanley Kubrick's tragically misunderstood final film, Eyes Wide Shut-a not-quite-dream-movie in which a young, restless, dissatisfied man experiences a revelation, embarks on a symbolically charged journey and encounters a series of seductive women who represent aspects of domesticity, each of which tells him a story that illuminates his predicament. Norbu isn't as formidable a talent as Kubrick or Zhang, but he shares aspects of their temperament, including a belief that archetypes and ritualized actions aren't just storytelling tools, but methods of illuminating human impulses that haven't changed and never will. Travellers and Magicians suggests that movies, songs, fables and dreams are not just ways of passing time, but means by which society reproduces itself.
Quiet master: Speaking of cinema that slyly illuminates life, Anthology Film Archives is having a retrospective of movies from Taiwanese writer-director Edward Yang, best known in the United States for his multiple award-winning domestic epic Yi Yi (which screens at Anthology Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m.). That movie is a low-key triumph of middle-class angst, but it represents a sliver of Yang's diverse and formidable talent. His arresting debut That Day, on the Beach (1982; screens Feb. 2 at 7:30 p.m.)-a story-within-a-story about two former schoolmates reunited after a 13-year separation-could be double-billed with Travellers and Magicians, since both films represent a multifaceted, idiosyncratic look at narrative and experience colliding against the backdrop of a society wracked by change. Yang's follow-up, Taipei Story (1985; screens Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.), continues that line of thought, depicting the disintegration of an outwardly successful, "modern" relationship (between pop singer Tsai Chin and director Hou Hsiao-sien, whose own work will be programmed at Anthology starting Feb. 4). For a complete schedule, call (212) 477-2714 or visit www.Anthologyfilmarchives.org.
"We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes." The American Museum of the Moving Image's annual collaboration with the New York Film Critics Circle presents a series of boundary-breaking movies. My selection, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, will screen in 35mm Jan. 29 at 2 p.m. For more information, see the AMMI schedule at www.movingimage.us.