By PLS
Travelers and Musicians is a Bhutanese road film. Built on a no-fail genre—think Chaucer; think Cervantes; think Kerouac—this film is so good that I saw it three times. I could see it again, too. It’s charming, enchanting, utterly transporting.
I can’t think of anything derogatory to write, though I could point to all the Aussie and Kiwi names in the production credits for a film directed by an incarnate lama. But hey! I need technical help with gadgets, too. This is clearly Norbu Khyentse’s film. The gentle clear-headedness is very Bhutanese.
At first I traced my enthusiasm to soft-headed nostalgia. I went trekking in Bhutan last fall. The seductive landscape of snow-bright peaks jabbing up behind enormous green hills, of icy rivers surging through boulder-packed stream beds, of sinuous, narrow roads clinging to cliffs, of whitewashed houses clinging to hillsides, of village people clinging to old customs and costumes—all this was generating a powerful I’ve-got-to-get-back-there urge.
So every walking muscle I own was activated. I was there, clumping down the road with restless young bureaucrat Dondup. Intentions advertised by his I-Heart-NY tee shirt and eye-blinding white sneakers, he’s reduced to hitchhiking because he missed the bus to the capital Thimpu, which means he may or may not lose his chance to reach America and get rich–and go to discos (his boombox is his most prized possession) and meet sexy women, like the babes in the posters he’s tacked to the walls of his room in the pokey village to which he’s been posted as a pretty big fish in a backwater.
The film’s Big Fat Question, of course, is whether Dondup will miss the bus in other, more important ways. His chance road companion, a cheery, humorous, maddeningly persistent young monk puts it this way: is Dondup headed for the land of his dreams or is he lost in a dreamland? The answer comes in the last scene, with film history’s most engaging grin.
Next I accused myself of hopeless exoticism. You know: anything not American or Western is better. Men in kneesocks and kilt-like ghos. Women wrapped in (mostly) glamorous kiras. The colorful main characters, of course: that monk in saffron and flipflops tossing out commentary on the disappointment inherent in expectation, musing on transience as the essence of beauty a la peach blossoms, strumming his dragon-headed dramyin to introduce a tale that illustrates the error of looking abroad for happiness; an old rice-paper-maker whose wares can’t compete with foreign stationary, thus a philosophical victim of globalization with a lovely nineteen-year-old daughter who's rejected the B.A. path for village-bound filial duty; a crinkly-eyed old apple farmer who views all and sundry with gentle amusement but seldom utters a word; a happy drunk waving a bottle and crooning Bhutanese folk songs from the bed of a dilapidated, but riotously painted truck whose driver offers the band of five increasingly well-bonded (and foot-sore) travelers a lift to a major junction.
Paper: art, bureaucrats. Apples: knowledge, sweetness. Inebriation: dreamland. There are no throw-aways and nothing gratuitous in this film, but the symbolism is so integral to action and character that I hardly noticed the bones of Travelers and Musicians until my second and third viewing, when bit by bit the sublimity of the craftsmanship became apparent. The film is a series of Chinese boxes, a tragedy within a comedy within the main story, yet the invitation to clumsy transitions is brilliantly avoided. Mountain mist dissolves into truck exhaust. Dondup wakes up rubbing his eyes in wonder just like the lost-in-every-way youth of the monk’s narrative. I was rubbing my eyes, too. Each tale felt incredibly real, as if I were living on three marvelous planes at once.
Speaking of perfect symbols, there’s the hilarious, huge, heavy wooden phallus being hoisted over a village house for good luck. A more or less tantric salute to Bhutan’s patron saint (or lama), who was all for enjoying the physical in the spiritual and vice versa, it signals the theme of desire that unites the three levels of narrative.
Eventually I perceived that what most drew me into this exquisite film was deeper than nostalia and exoticism. Sure, it’s set in Bhutan and rings true to my experience there. But, really, it’s just plain human and downright universal, a delightful rendition of the familiar old tug-of-war between fantasy and reality, a revisioning of the age old search for happiness.
Pure bliss---I found it, for a couple of hours, at least, watching Travelers and Musicians.
PS. This film is very funny, too.
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