Dir. Martin Scorsese
Rating PG, 150mins
Currently Screening at: the Academy, Greater Union Pitt Centre, Village Roxy, Parramatta, Hoyts Chatswood and Warringah, and Roseville cinemas

Mutual agreement is a rare phenomenon, which makes the current critical success of Kundun in Australia a subject worth raising. In all journals, from weekly rags to the respectable rags, phrases such as "poetic masterpiece" and "a beautiful and moving experience" have been thrown about madly, the critics finally happy to get something good, honest and true. From the face of the two year old Dalai Lama to the roll of the credits, Kundun goes down easy. It's majestic yet intimate, optimistic and realistic, and very pretty. It's also a little too simple, and my use if the word "pretty" as opposed to "beautiful" is noted. The images don't come out of the trauma of the film, but arise like ornate, half-drugged clouds from another country, which in turn gets taken as "poetry". Scorsese, more and more the master technician, is on holiday, and the postcards have dazzled the jaded crowds. They are solemn and reverent, maybe even a little idealised, and a lovely retreat from Catholic guilt and masochism.

What we are given is impossibly fragile, a world unimaginable enough for us, let alone Scorsese. They last time we greeted Scorsese at the cinema, Joe Pesci was beaten to death with baseball bats and De Niro ended up living a half-life as a schmuck bookie. Now the threat of violence is completely exterior, and we have entered into something so alien from our own existence, so tranquil that the only reaction forthcoming is "masterpiece"! Bemusement has quickly been transformed into hyperbole. Scorsese has created no great scenes, no "privileged moments" like the type found in Taxi Driver, Goodfellas etc.. The restless energy, the nerve of Scorsese has been bled out and been replaced by hushed awe. In journalese, he has matured.

Yet is this maturity, or middle-aged nerves? After Casino, Scorsese was accused of milking a dry formula, and the need for new material is obviously of great importance. The same milieu can grow tiresome, and recently Scorsese has been trying to deal with lost themes in new scenarios. The Age of Innocence and The Last Temptation of Christ are two of his most underated films, attempts to find balance outside of New York. The drama inherent in both films, a character shaped and thus restricted by the society, the expectations around him, receives a weaker treatment in Kundun. There was an inherent violence in those films, Scorsese working through a dilemma that hadn't been resolved, that made them such vital cinema. For all the 'classical' flaws present in Temptation, (the overlength, the disjointed narrative) the power of Scorsese's vision, to review and ultimately reveal the concept of Christ to us, gave it power and vision. At the risk of promoting naive auteurism, the personal colours all of Scorsese's greatest films. Charlie, Scorsese's alterego in Mean Streets, is emblematic of Scorsese, the restless urges combined with the need to try and resolve all the problems he faces. This tension is absent from Kundun. Two countries stand opposed with one man in the centre, but the film remains distant and pre-determined. The Dalai Lama is glazed from beginning to end.

This pre-determined vision of the Dalai Lama works throughout the film. Mao Tse Tung is an awful caricature, some of the worst filmmaking in Scorsese's career, and the whole film rarely affects us because Scorsese has given us an interior drama and placed this drama upon a character who is too reverential to touch. Scorsese has neutered himself, but added all the right touches to please the patrons of 'arthouse' cinema. The rat in the temple, the sandsculptures and the Philip Glass score all work as arbitrary effects but rarely connect with the themes of the film. T.S. Eliot retreated from the angst of the modern with Buddhism, and I think Scorsese is attempting a similar sleight of hand of here. The cruelty of the Chinese and the pacifism of the Tibetians play off each other quite nicely, and we can take a nice moral lesson from it all. Of course we can't retreat from our countries, so the lesson eventually seems a little fatuous and naive. The Scorsese who saw no way out of the city has suddenly exiled himself. Kundun is The Last Emperor of the 90s, sacred sights rendered delectable. Figures remain distant, the beauty in the colour scheme and not in the film itself. As Scorsese ages, he loses, like Bertolucci did, his vitality. Kundun isn't quite Little Buddha, but it's a long way away from the obsessive Taxi Driver or Last Tango in Paris. It's too safe, too reassuring.

Before the film a commercial starring Goldie Hawn and Alanis Morrissette and yes, Richard Gere, appeared begging for tolerance in Tibet, a superficial celebrity mode of address sure to unburden consciences worldwide. Kundun is a film sure to adored by liberals, loved for its subject and thus inscrutable in the basic currency of film criticism. Like the Dalai Lama at the end of the film, looking through a telescope at the land he has left, Scorsese is at too far a distance to make a great film. It's a neo-realist film by an alien. Martin Scorsese, please come home. As Michael Lerner said in Barton Fink: "There's plenty of poetry in that ring".

Adam Rivett
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