Kundun Directed by Martin Scorsese
With its unlimited budgets and nearly perfect technological mastery, the real surprise of Hollywood might be why more films like Kundun don't get made? (If you had the God-like power to create absolutely anything, presumably you wouldn't confine yourself to bringing comic books to life.)
Kundun is the view from a time machine. If we'd had contemporary technology faithfully recording the sights and sounds of the young Dalai Lama's life in remote Tibet 50 years ago, we probably couldn't have preserved a better record than what Martin Scorsese has created after-the-fact. Kundun has that feel.
Scorsese has performed a Hollywood trick, of course. He didn't actually have a time machine. But, given that, and given that the acting is done by non-actor Tibetans, and that the story (unlike Amistad, or The Titanic, or Seven Years in Tibet) is painstakingly (NOT painfully, but PAINSTAKINGLY) faithful to the historical record, Scorsese's is a much trickier trick than animating Flubber or keeping Double-Oh-Seven unscarred. Scorsese has informed this trick with a talent rare enough to be genius.
Kundun is not, by any means, a flawless movie, but it makes you realize what there is to be grateful for when commerce can bring us these splendid tricks of light. Wealth and technology are not enough: we have to be grateful to Hollywood for allowing Scorsese to surface and succeed; we have to be grateful to Disney for having the corporate courage to ignore the Chinese government's strong opposition to this film; and we have to be grateful to Scorsese for his talent. (And, perhaps, too, we have to be grateful to the Dalai Lama. This visual poetry is his life, after all. Or, at least, one of his lives.)
Too many pieces have fallen into place with this film for you to miss it if you care about what movies can be.
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(ag846@lafn.org) Frans Gustafson
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