User Reviews

Personally I don't understand some of the comments here. The scene where (spoiler!) the Dalai Lama absorbs the horrific news that some Chinese soldiers made children kill their own parents, though it lasts, only seconds. When I say absorbs, I mean it: the news goes through him like a knife in the guts, and through any attentive viewer's guts also. I fail to see how anyone can say "it never comes close to the emotional heights", there or in the "sky funeral" where his father is fed to the vultures. To call this "empty symbolism, and some wooden acting" is just to abhor Buddhist teaching itself, which emphasize calm and ritual to remain calm (only). "How could something so interesting at the same time create such ennui?" Easy. Because it's putting you in that state.

I agree that "like "Baraka" and "Koyaanisqatsi", the devices of the film maker are important as the script" and that the film is "not attempting to glorify the life of an extraordinary man but instead presents a balanced look at a complex country and a complex religion. Instead of making the Dalai Lhama out to be a saint he presents him as the humble but very human man he is, caught up in the struggle for his country and his religious freedom from the Chinese in the only way that his principles and religion will allow." and that "this movie is not just about one man, but about the pain of all mankind and the way to transcend the pain and sin of ours in a very buddhist direction." To say that "at its heart it is also a cold, detached and distanced view" may be a compliment. The very hot story requires a very cool treatment.

Is it "passionless"? I doubt it. It does "give the audience a cultural experience- to try to convey a religious state of mind through the use of the camera and the sound track. To get us in to the Buddhist mental state it must sacrifice in the script and drama departments" if by those one means action and conflict. The main conflict is the political one, and it is played out in stages, especially the sequence of generals starting off with reasonable explanations of why the Communists had to rise, ending up with blank repeated orders - each lower in rank. Yes it had the "best cinematography and best music", Phillip Glass outdid himself and he clearly understood the passion that lives within Buddhism. If you feel this film is passionless, close your eyes a while. Or get the soundtrack itself and play it in the dark. Really.

I agree that "Kundun" is "up there with the screen's greatest biographies (Lawrence of Arabia, Ghandi, Out of Africa)" but since it is about a great Buddhist it would do a disservice not to "separate itself from the emotion, from the humanity". If it "ends up failing miserably to convey the horror experienced by the Tibetan people", fine. If someone was "as emotionally involved in this film as I would have been in a PBS documentary on insects", then, consider, having compassion for insects, as the boy who will become the Dalai Lama demonstrates in one of the most compelling early scenes. "Kundun, in my opinion, needs to be viewed as a cinematic (audio-visual) exploration of the Tibetan spirituality and the cycles of existence - birth, death, reincarnation".

It is no contradiction to see it as "a huge, beautifully and intricately decorated gift box which, when I opened it, proved to be empty. "But your Box is the gift-- isn't it beautiful?" Well sure it is... but you could have put SOMETHING inside it." Why? Religion is itself the box.

I agree that "in twenty years time Kundun will be recognised as one of the top ten films ever produced in motion picture history". I empathize with the fellow "watching this movie hours after finding my girlfriend with her new man and being the last to know the relationship was over,I completely broke down almost on every chapter" - ah, exactly the point. I saw it with a woman I had asked to marry me several times (she said no), her son who was about ten, and a good friend of ours who had been in jail in India and meditated with the Dalai Lama when he visited. I think it was the last significant thing I did with these three people. I can no longer separate my love for them from my love for this film. I think I learned its lesson. Attachment is not the point of living well.

The beautifully wrapped box will always be empty - and that is wonderful.

"Kundun" is one of Scorsese's finest pictures. It won't be appreciated until well after he's dead, but that's natural when you're dealing with artists of his calibre.

With "Kundun" Scorsese transcends his documentary approach to film and instead relies purely on ethereal imagery and sound. Liquid images, sparse dialogue and a narrative structure (memory and recollections) that justifies it, "Kundun" is the perfect marriage of cinematic form and content.

Scorsese's previous experiment along these lines was "The Age of Innocence". That film was excellent, but its images were formal and based around rituals and rigid order. It was about an uptight society populated by constrained characters.

"Kundun's" camera, in contrast, is free. It's about the ethereal qualities of cinema. Fleeting moments and partial recollections, memories of sound and touch stitched together and framed as a child's waking dream. The film reaches its apotheosis during a 9 minute sequence toward the end where the Lama travels to India by horse. It's the most affecting ten minutes in Scorsese's filmography.

Scorsese has never been a visual storyteller. He uses violence, kinetic edits and explosive actors as a crutch. This is not a criticism, it's just his natural style. But what's great about "Kundun" is that allows us to watch Scorsese step out of his comfort zone.

Ever since his early student films, Scorsese has been obsessed with recreating and repackaging reality as film. His stories were filmed documentaries, his Italian camera tied firmly to his characters (Travis, Jesus, Lamotta etc), the story fleshed out by focusing on the defining moments of the person's life. To drive the story forward, he uses the threat of violence. To end the story altogether, he calls down scenes of carnage. As his style of storytelling is such that he can follow his characters around indefinitely, his tales require some form of external destruction to bring the story to an abrupt close.

Of course "Kundun" again plays to Scorsese's documentary sensibilities. It is a story about the Dalai Lama. A filmed recreation of his life. But in every aspect, "Kundun" transcends the old Scorsese. Instead of method actors desperately pretending to be real (Dinero), we have real human beings who are not trained as actors. Instead of rock-and-roll songs driving the story forward, we have ethereal, ever-present music acting as a tapestry upon which the images are played. And instead of violence propelling the story, we have a hero morally opposed to violence.

Scorsese's film also acts as a meditation on his earlier pictures. While "Taxi Driver", "Goodfellas" and "Casino" portray worlds completely devoid of spiritual values, "Kundun" implores us to meditate on such values. In Travis Bickle's explosions of sociopathic rage and Henry Hill's drug-induced paranoia, we witness the mirror perversions of the Dalai Lama's spiritual transcendence.

"Kundun" is Scorsese taking his particular brand of film-making to it's logical conclusion. Any other attempt to make a "documentary film" after "Kundun" is a wasted effort and is doomed to failure. Look at his latest mess, "The Aviator", a film in which he is caught between being the Old Scorsese and the New Scorsese. This artistic confusion just doesn't work.

It took Scorsese two conscious attempts to become a purely visual storyteller. With "Gangs of New York" he started thinking in terms of cinematic space. If the "Kundun" experiment was about music and images, the Gangs experiment was about cinema as a location. A 3d environment in which the "space" is the "central character".

Interestingly, "Kundun" also features several sequences ripped from Godfrey Reggio's influential documentary, "Koyaanisqatsi". Reggio collaborator Phillip Glass provides the music for "Kundun", and several of the film's audio-visual set pieces (Sand Mandala/Dreams etc) owe a lot to Reggio's work.

"Kundun's" score was also quite novel for Scorsese. It's no coincidence that he chose Philip Glass to compose the film's music. After Scorsese saw Paul Schrader's "Mishima" he noted that "One day I would love to be able to make a film that would cry out for a score by Philip Glass."

In 1980, Glass wrote a famous three-act opera called Satyagraha (meaning passive, non-violent resistance). It was about the period Ghandi spent in South Africa (1893-1914). Each act of his opera took a historical figure as a sort of spiritual guardian (Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King Jr) who represented the past, present and future of non violent resistance.

Just like "Kundun", Glass's opera was about both historical time and politics, and showed it's audience how to be truly civilised in a gratuitously hostile, indifferent world. How to be holy in an unholy world.

10/10 - Critics seemed to hate "Kundun" because they believed it to be too passive. American cinema is largely a cinema of action. A film like "Kundun", where inaction is action, rubbed them the wrong way. But make no mistake, "Kundun" is great cinema. Watch "Taxi Driver" and "Kundun" back to back to appreciate both Old and New Scorsese perfected. Watch "Departed", "Bringing out the Dead" and "Aviator" to see him regress.

Worth multiple viewings.

''Kundun'' is an amazing movie, who tells us the story of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, also known as Tenzin Gyatso and still alive in the present days. He was born in a peasant family in 1935, in a small village called Taktser in north eastern Tibet, and was recognised at the age of two as the reincarnation of his predecessor the 13th Dalai Lama by other Lamas and Riponches. Some informations about this movie are changed,but nothing too serious:little facts like the year he was born or the age e was enthroned as Tibet's Head of State.

I also find this movie very similar to ''Seven Years in Tibet'' in small points, like showing the Dalai Lama trying to ride a car, he looking people and places with his telescope, seeing maps and even watching the western movies he was so fascinated for. (Saddly Heinrich didn't come to explain to him the things :P )

ps:I really hope that the Dalai Lama can come back to Tibet someday. It's so annoying the Chinese occupation :/ is even worst when you watch movies, because what you read about stay memorized and marked in your memory.