Kundun

...The coup de thd~tre that united the two partners--they met when Lambert summoned Emmeline from an audience and produced a bouquet from the folds of her scarf--has faded to a distant memory, and Emmeline feels ignored by her preoccupied husband, who has taken to sleeping alone...

...The prolific Brian Moore introduces us to the intriguing eponymous heroine of his new novel by following her through the frivolities and veiled maneuvering of a sdrie...

...Even more poignant is the boy's relationship with his parents, pious Buddhists who feeI both blessed and nonplussed that their son has turned out to be the avatar of the compassionate Buddha...

...China advances, the Dalai Lama urges firmness without bloodshed...

...Significantly, the screenwriter and instigator of the project was Melissa Mathison, who wrote the best children's movies of the last quarter century, E.T...

...Officials bully, the Dalai Lama sits mute...

...But when the Dalai Lama must express his anguish, Scorsese can only have Tsarong hide his face and shake his shoulders...

...It's difficult to dramatize a nonviolent hero's resistance to tyranny...

...And some of the most memorable shots aren't spectacular ones of nature or war but odd, sneaky glances and telling gestures: Kundun staring down with wonder at the beautiful shoes he can now wear after a childhood of poverty...

...That little sideways slide, as menacing as any death threat in a Scorsese Mafioso movie, lets Kundun and us know that compromise won't work...

...Kundun's protagonist is different: a hero elected by fate, abashed by his responsibilities and his powers of clairvoyance, who modestly watch es himself rising to the historical occasion when his country is menaced by China...

...a mouse drinking with impunity from goblets of water on an altar...

...Then there is a final interview and the mask slips...

...We see through the boy's eyes, and Scorsese's virtuosic panning is strictly anchored to the wonderment the boy feels as his roving eyes fasten on one thing after another: the gleaming, candle-lit faces of the monks as they examine the child for signs of holiness...

...And Scorsese tempers his cinematic style to the quality of his hero...

...When the Dalai Lama dreams of the slaughter of his people, Scorsese positions the ruler amid a mass of blood-drenched corpses and pulls the camera back into a distant overhead shot that turns the welter of bodies into a Jackson Pollock painting...

...The glint of danger, the flash of insight, the change of destiny--these are dramatic in a way that's absent from much of the movie...

...Of the same mind himself, the emperor turned the Second Empire into a spectacle radiating faux imperial glamour...

...Kundun has gone to China to negotiate with Mao, and the tyrant has just about convinced the Tibetan leader that comnmnism can coexist peacefully, even fruitfully, with Buddhism...

...While Kundun's father's corpse is, according to custom, chopped up and fed to vultures, the director has Mao's imperialistic demands read on the soundtrack, which seems to present a glib, false parallel between a sacred rite (no matter how grisly to our Western eyes) and the brutal dismemberment of a country...

...It evinces sympathy yet it's also diffident, even a little opaque...

...Like the child, the camera beautifully notices...

...The magician's marriage, ironically, has lost its magic...

...And now Martin Scorsese's Kundun, the life of the Dalai Lama from boyhood until his exile from Tibet, proves to be, at its best, more lyrical and more tender than any other movie by this director...

...Jean-Jacques Annaud's Seven Years in Tibet may or may not have been historically accurate, but it scored as a boy's adventure story that H Rider Haggard would have approved...

...No matter how violent the waves, the wall remains smooth, smooth, smooth...

...Commonweal 2 2 February27, 1998...

...Each autumn, members of various 61ites--aristocrats, socialites, artists, politicians, etc.--were invited to Compi6gne, assigned rooms according to status, and required to adhere to a rigorous agenda of dressing, dining, watching hounds devour the entrails of hunted stags, and other social niceties...

...It never bores yet it never makes you catch your breath...

...The time-tripping of reincarnation...

...But Scorsese has also made some miscalculations...

...This movie has a glinting beauty and a steady, perhaps too steady, tempo...

...The reliance on anecdote and legends to teach truths...

...Kundun doesn't deteriorate after these early magical sequences, but rather it levels off...

...The monks must chide him when he doesn't study, yet, a moment after scolding, they hang on his every word...

...Tsarong is perfect in his scenes with the Red generals whose bureaucratic huffing amusingly contrasts with the spiritual leader's calm certitude...

...Three of the greatest technical artists Commonweal aj | Februamj 27, 1998 alive cinematographer Roger Deakins, designer Dante Ferretti, and editor Thelma Schoonmaker--helped Scorsese to a visual exquisiteness that never becomes pompous or pseudo-mystical...

...Of course, the maker of The Age of In nocence and The Last Temptation of Christ had already proved his ability to range wid ely in subject matter, but always this obsessive has been drawn to other obsessives...

...For me, most of the best scenes are in the first half-hour, when the child is discovered by Tibet's regent to be the fourteenth Dalai Lama and taken to the central monastery for education and eventual enthronement...

...The acting of nonprofessionals in all roles is mostly wonderful but in the lead role of the grown Kundun, Tenzin Thyjthob Tsarong demonstrates the limits of the amateur actor, even when he's physically appealing and apt...

...You must understand," the chairman purrs with oleaginous certitude as he shifts his bulk on a settee a little closer to his "honored" guest, "that all religions are poison...the opiate of the people...

...Also good is the paradoxical relationship of little Kundun (the name given to all the Dalai Lamas) to the adults who are both in charge and in awe of him...

...Slaughter takes place, the Dalai Lama's face is filled with anguish...

...Even after Kundun's selection, his father slaps the imp who plucks a hair from the paternal moustache, but then feels obliged to apologize...

...In any event, though Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha was mostly dreadful, its forty-five-minute rendition of the story, of Prince Siddharta was as limpid and joyous as the best children's picture book...

...These heavy-handed directorial tricks are meant to cover the fact that the nonprofessional can't really produce the requisite emotion...

...It's an overly aesthetic effect, something the director generally avoids...

...The problem becomes clear by contrast when there occurs a scene of high drama near the end of the movie...

...All of Scorsese's other films run temperatures of 105, but Kun dun is strictly nibbuta...

...Napoleon IIl's invitation shatters a period of tedium and melancholy for the clear-headed Emmeline, the wife of the celebrated French illusionist Henri Lambert...

...I would call it cool in the sense of the old Indian word, nibbuta, "the sense of being cool after a fever...

...It's not that nonviolent resistance is in itself nondramatic, but the seesaw pattern of violent provocation and tacit response is monotonous...

...Yet this fihn is quite an achievement for Scorsese, a step forward because it's a step sideways...

...Lonely, and ill-at-ease amidst her husband's clockwork attendants, Emmeline is left to brood over her recent miscarriages...

...the rich material of his new shoes...

...I felt I was watching a stormy ocean thundering against a great smooth wall...

...Abracadabra Celia Wren he Empire must be a succession of miracles," a minister once remarked to the French monarch, Napoleon III...

...our hero, riding through Peking, innocently enjoying a Red Chinese children's chorus, only to have the performance cut short by his more savvy adviser who recognizes propagandistic drivel when he hears it and politely rolls up the window...

...And the last sequence of Kundun's escape from his enemies into India has too many slowmotion shots and gnomic utterances on the soundtrack This turns the escape into something lyrical instead of the passage through purgatory that the climax requires...

...Epitomizing the decadence of his regime were the annual sdries, week-long, glorified house parties held at the palace at Compi6gne...

...She is also bored: After his years of diverting European high society, Lambert has retired to a Tours estate to work on the uncanny mechanical figurines that terrify visiting tradesmen...

...It is as uncharacteristic of his other works as Hard Times was for Dickens, as the "Old Possum" poems were for Eliot...

...Only a truly major, fertile artist dares not to be himself...

...and The Black Stallion...