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Journey to self-discovery
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The story of man's struggle between the sensual and the spiritual is an old one. `Samsara' by Pan Nalin translates this essentially philosophical argument into stunning cinematic images. MADHU JAIN writes.
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"WHO'S that man?" The question was on many lips the night Pan Nalin's film "Samsara" opened the fourth Cinefan Film Festival in Delhi recently. Gob smacked. There is no other way to describe the look on the faces of people as they staggered out of the cavernous Siri Fort auditorium after seeing this stunningly shot, compellingly told story about the temptations of a Buddhist monk and his journey towards self-discovery.
It is a question people should ask. In all the hype and miles of newsprint about "Lagaan", "Bollywood Dreams", "Monsoon Wedding" and "Devdas", nobody noticed the waves "Samsara" was making elsewhere. Miramax-Disney will distribute the film in the United States. It's been on European screens for the last three months, making it to the top 10 in Italy and France, and staying on and on in Switzerland. Fred Fuchs, the producer of "Godfather" and "Rainmaker", has just signed Nalin for his next film titled "Sudden Enlightenment" about Bodhidharma, the Indian monk who took martial arts and Zen to China.
Nalin is quietly making his way to the rarified world of the `A' list of directors. His feature length film, "Ayurveda — Art of Being" is on in Europe and the U.S.. Sidney Pollock had him over for dinner just recently. Is he going the Shekhar Kapur way? There is something special about Pan Nalin. He doesn't quite look his 37 years, with his just-short-of-the-shoulders springy hair and glowing brown skin. His name (Pan is short for Pandya) is ambiguous enough to give the impression that he could be from anywhere in Asia: Pan-Asian if you can excuse the pun.
But what sets this Paris-based director apart is his ability to translate philosophical musings into riveting cinematic images in his debut feature film. Up there, 15,000 feet above sea level in the stark landscape of a Ladakh bathed in a sort of primal light, the images have perforce to be spectacular, actually mindblowing. ("Samsara" is the first feature film to be shot in Ladakh.) The basic story of a monk caught between the spiritual and the sensual is not new: it is as old as, or even older than, our scriptures. Indian cinema has often explored the struggle between the flesh and the spirit: Nabendu Sengupta's "Trishangi" with Nana Patekar as a middle-aged Buddhist monk obsessed with a young girl and wrestling with his demons of lust is one of the more recent films on this theme.
Hollywood, too, has also tried to capture spiritual quests and the Buddhist path in films such as Martin Scorcese's "Kundan" and Bernardo Bertolucci's "Little Buddha". However, the philosophical and spiritual aspects got offloaded en route. Only the aesthetics survived the journey to the screen. Nalin has used aesthetics, the pretty-pretty images of the landscape to tell a very moral tale, without being moralistic or pedantic. Rustling winds, lunar-like landscapes which appear to stretch to infinity, the drone-like chant of the monks, sounds of the bells on the necks of horses, erotically sublime and gravity-defying lovemaking — all these put the viewer in a heightened state of awareness. The images and sounds are, largely, not gratuitous. They tell his tale and take it further.
There were those who asked themselves whether the stunning beauty of the images masked a lack a depth. I found the moral tale simply told, and absorbing, despite some of the pręt-a-porter Eastern wisdom packaged for the West. Moreover, the tribal temptress Sujata, who performs the kind of sexual feats that had the European audience on the edge of its seat, is more suitable for the ramp.
Essentially, the story is about Tashi, a young Ladakhi (Shawn Ku from the U.S.) monk who returns to his monastery after spending three years, three weeks and three days in a deep trance, and in complete isolation. After his return the monk, increasingly disturbed by wet dreams (Nalin does not mince his, well, images) and distracted by the sight of women, opts for the secular world. In a telling argument with the senior monk, who tries to dissuade him from leaving, Tashi says that even the Buddha had 29 years of a secular life before he left it. This point is beautifully underlined by the delightful five-year-old (he is, in actual fact, a child-monk) in the monastery who misses his parents and just wants to play like a child.
Marriage, fatherhood, materialism, anger, lust, adultery — Tashi goes through the entire cycle before he realises that he can't cope with the complexities of this world, and his own inadequacies. He decides to return to the monastery.
The question that looms large throughout the film is: do you satisfy many desires or do you just conquer one? Fortunately, Nalin has no pat answers. His film is open-ended, with quite a feminist twist at the end.
Tashi's wife, Pema (subtly played by the beautiful Hong Kong actress Christy Chung) laments the fact that nobody ever talks about Yashodhara, Buddha's wife, who was abandoned in the middle of the night. She may also have been as compassionate and enlightened as her husband, but could not follow that path even if she wanted to because she can't leave her son.
Nalin's own journey is quite fascinating. He grew up in Adatala, a village near Junagadh in Gujarat. His father had a shop selling savouries at the local railway station. Nalin would sit on the deserted rail track waiting for a train to arrive, "staring at five empty cups of tea hanging from my five fingers". His dreams lay elsewhere. He wanted to make films, ever since he saw the mythological "Jai Mahakali". "I was frightened, I ran and hid under a bed, but from that day all I could think of was to make films."
It was not easy: he only spoke Gujarati. Nalin's drawing skills got him a scholarship to the Baroda School of Fine Arts. Persistence and enterprise got him into the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, NID's Visual Communications department was the closest he could get to filmmaking.
The next step was to learn English: he distributed rosaries in a tribal area in exchange for English lessons from Father Rosario. Durga Khote gave him his first Bolex camera. So, off he went. Nalin made several industrial films and documentaries.
"From the beginning I decided that I would never assist anybody. I was paranoid about my purity. I ran away from all the art filmmakers. I wanted to do our own stories. Our cinema had been influenced by the neo-realism of Italy, the French new wave, or expressionism."
Nalin collects stories, as others do pebbles on the beach. His first lesson in telling stories in fact came from his mother. "My mother is illiterate. But what she told me has always guided me: if an entire village listens to you, the universe will listen to you." Obviously, he listens too.
During his long "unlearning spree", he travelled from the Himalayas to Kerala, lending his ear to swamis, gurus and devadasis: the erotic scenes in his film came out of conversation with a 92-year-old devadasi he met in Andhra Pradesh.
Nalin has always been interested in the jugalbandhi between the spiritual and the sensual, the sacred and the profane. His bag of stories is like the proverbial golden goose. He has already made several documentaries and short fiction films for the National Geographic, Discovery, ChannelPlus and the BBC on subjects like reincarnation, devadasis.
His future project will probably be a contemporary take on the Mahabharat: Manhattan will be the new Kurukshetra in his update on the epic.
Nalin has come a long way from the railway station where his father sold tea. He lives with his Argentinean-Polish wife in Paris, but is forever on the move, more familiar with international airport lounges than his own living room. Last heard of he was in some remote area of Cambodia scouting locations for his film on Bodhidharma.
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