March 3- 9, 2005

movies

Amazing Journey

Dream weaver: Sonam Kinga's monk spins Travellers & Magicians' tale.

Part realist, part fairy tale, Travellers & Magicians is a captivating trip.

by Sam Adams

Like his 1999 The Cup, in which a group of Tibetan monks scavenged satellite dishes to watch the World Cup final, Tibetan lama Khyentse Norbu's Travellers & Magicians is explicitly concerned with the clash between old and new worlds. But where The Cup celebrated the collision of ancient values and global culture, Travellers sounds a cautionary note. When Dondup (Tshewang Dendup) tells a Tibetan monk (Sonam Kinga) that he is leaving his village home to go to America, the land of his dreams, the monk warns, "You should be careful of dreamlands, because when you wake up, it may not be so pleasant."

Shaggy-haired Dondup has only just returned to his village as a newly appointed official when the word comes from a friend in San Francisco: Be in the nearest city in three days, or miss your chance at a visa. Dondup packs his most precious belongings, including a small bag and a boom box that blasts sugary pop, and hightails it out of town. As he points out, the place has "no movies, no restaurants and most of all, no cool girls," reason enough to hit the road.

Just missing the bus — a housewarming ceremony involving the hoisting of a wooden phallus slows his journey — Dondup finds himself hitchhiking with a toothless old apple seller (Ap Dochu) and the yellow-clad monk, who tells Dondup a story to pass the time. Here, the movie splits in two, alternating between Dondup's attempts to thumb a ride and the story of the equally wanderlusting Tashi (Lhakpa Dorji), who quits his own village and winds up lost in the woods, stumbling on a house inhabited by a gruff, alcoholic woodcutter (Gomchen Penjore) and his beautiful young wife, Deki (Deki Yangzom).

A simple but not simplistic parable, Travellers outlines the twice-told dangers of leaving home. But the movie isn't quite as conservative as it appears. For one thing, the shimmering texture of what the credits call "Tashi's World" is an obvious, even ostentatious, CGI effect that contrasts notably with the Satyajit Ray naturalism of the present-day sequences. For another, the two stories don't exactly parallel each other: Tashi and Deki's burgeoning love affair turns into a woodsy film noir, while Dondup's attraction to the fresh-faced Sonam (Sonam Lhamo) betokens nothing more complicated than a growing appreciation for the comforts of home. Instead of simply telling the same story twice, Travellers explores the role of old-fashioned storytelling in a global culture that increasingly regards fiction as a luxury, not a necessity. The monk's tale, which turns out to have its own embedded fictions, demonstrates not just that stories can revive traditions that have slipped into disuse but that the telling is an essential ritual in itself. Though the monk's story has a dash of sorcery, the magicians of the movie's title are really the monk and Norbu himself, using words and images to create fantastic visions of a fantasy world that exists under our feet.

Travellers & Magicians Written and directed by Khyentse Norbu A Zeitgeist release Opens Friday at Ritz East recommended