Buddhism deals with birth, suffering and death and the unending life cycle is called Samsara. Buddha left his prince hood to seek an answer for the unending sufferings that he saw all around him. After the enlightenment, he said it is desire, the cause of all our miseries…so get rid of the desires…get rid of the world that you live in. Shut up in a cave and meditate. That's what we see first in this movie. Tashi, who was n a long meditation (for three years, three months, three weeks and three days) inside a cave in the Himalayas, is taken back to the monastery. After meeting with a village girl, he demands for a freedom to follow his carnal desires stating even Buddha had them until the age of 29. Seeing his lack of concentration in monastery duties and frequent wet dreams, the spiritual adviser grants him his freedom to find out life and make a decision on it. This makes up the first segment of the movie and it goes almost one hour.
The second segment is Tashi's marriage with Pema, and his life as a husband and father. This segment also runs for one hour and the final segment, which includes the conversation between Pema and Tashi, summarizes the whole point of the movie and lasts for about ten minutes. This is about the structure of Samsara. This is photographed in the high altitude locations in Ladakh in Kashmir and is very pleasant to watch. The narration is slow paced, which is apt for the spiritual content of the film. The love scenes were also photographed well and the music score was spiritual.
Samsara talks about the eternal conflict, the one between the flesh and spirit and at some point it grows to question the Buddha himself on a feminist perspective, by creating identical situations. At some point in the monastery segment, we hear a question, how do you keep a drop of water from ever drying up...? At the finishing of the movie, we get the answer, as carved on the back of a stone...By sending it into the sea. This can be read in two dimensions as well. How do you keep your carnal desires burning…? By indulging in them frequently. How do you keep your spirit alive? By immersing it into an ocean of spiritual activities. This is how I read Samsara. Samsara brings up some of the unanswered questions on whether Buddha was right to leave his family and impose the same sufferings onto the one who loved him. I think Buddha himself was confused after his enlightenment, and this confusion led to the great split among his followers towards Mahayana and Heenayana.
What I really liked about this film also is the fact that it presented us with the female point of view in the final monologue of Tashi's wife Pema. She was given no choice from him when he decided to go back to the monastery. She had to stay behind and take care of their son. She was shown to us as the keeper of the traditions (not allowing her son to play with the modern toy his father bought him from Leh) but at the same time she had that free spirit to make love to the unknown Lama and afterward to even marry him. I liked the sensitivity of the writer / director who cared not only to show us the pain of Pema when realizing she's losing his husband, but also to make her an intelligent woman who thinks and who turns out be as wise and devoted as her Lama husband.
It's less important whether you get any answers...and Samsara is one of the finest movies in recent years.
Lora Traykova
No comments:
Post a Comment