Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
SIFF is bringing a 4K restoration of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1993 film Little Buddha for a revival at the Uptown, which gives me an excuse to revive a piece I wrote for Film Comment (July/August 1994 issue) about the film, and about Bertolucci's appearance at the 1994 Seattle International Film Festival. Also, the movie was partly shot in Seattle. And Bertolucci stopped by Scarecrow, too!
Little Buddha
The first image in a film by Bernardo Bertolucci is a bridge—this is the opening shot of The Grim Reaper, which the 22-year-old Italian poet made in 1962. It is a handsome shot, a beautiful shot, of an ugly and featureless concrete curve, leading nowhere. In over thirty years, Bertolucci has taken a journey from this road to Little Buddha, a journey from a low- budget black-and-white theoretical picture made under the influence of Godard and Pasolini to a big-budget, lavishly appointed theoretical picture made under the influence of—I don't know—D.W. Griffith and the Dalai Lama?
The seething brain of a Bertolucci film has always seemed clouded by opposing arguments, kept synaptically acute by the director's inability to decide precisely what it was he was arguing for—even when the conflict of the particular film was easily graspable (poor vs. rich, animal lust vs. intellectual aridity, communism vs. fascism). I think one's first reaction to Little Buddha is: Has a Bertolucci movie ever seemed less like a Bertolucci movie? Is there a director who seems less suited to folding himself cross-legged under the bodhi tree in blissed-out quietude? But keep in mind that Bertolucci, just 31 when he made Last Tango in Paris, is now a man in his fifties, and the path to enlightenment is long. Little Buddha isn't the final incarnation for this director, but feels like more of a bridge to other things.
This one, true to Bertoluccian tradition, has a split personality, cut in two in this case by parallel stories 2500 years apart. Like the division of the worlds of 1900 into aristocratic and peasant, Bertolucci's scheme carries his ideas to you in a nakedly simple container; then we expect, and hope for, the poet's sensibility to transform simplicity into complexity. Yet in Little Buddha Bertolucci has made an avowedly simple film, a movie that seeks to be uncomplicated: somewhat akin to the Indiana Jones cycle, in which Spielberg and Lucas never wanted anything more than an homage to cliffhanger serials done on a Light & Magic scale—and thus, never got anything more than that. Little Buddha doesn't appear to want to do anything more than tell the story of Buddha (with Spielbergian FX and T2 morphing under the bodhi tree) and graft it onto a critique of our bleached modern society. That may be less than what we expect of a Bertolucci movie, but it's certainly more than what we get on an average evening at the pictures.
In one of Little Buddha's less magical moments, the wise old Lama Norbu sighs, "We are all just children," and you have to worry to what extent Bertolucci settles for this as the movie's method and summation. In a press conference for the film's American premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival, Bertolucci said that "we in the West are all children when it comes to Buddhism," so maybe that’s all he means. He also said that "the challenge [on Little Buddha] was to do a film without conflicts, or without the conflicts in my usual films."
This sounds like an alarming dumbing-down, but it also sounds as though Bertolucci took to Little Buddha in the spirit of an experiment. Is that an entirely bad thing? I'm already craving a return to the awkward psychosexual tension and puzzling longueurs of The Sheltering Sky, to say nothing of the richly ambiguous Conformist-era mise-en-scene, but if Bertolucci wants to make a movie for children, this one is just fine.
Little Buddha has a lovely, out-of- the-deep-earth majesty in its telling of the primary myth of Buddhism. This is where the director's storytelling instincts are engaged, in making the pages of a children's book come alive with a story that is both exotic and fundamental. The other, present-day half of the film, in which parents Dean and Lisa Conrad (Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda) must ponder the possibility that their 9-year-old son Jesse (Alex Wiesendanger) is the reincarnation of a great Buddhist lama, is thin and advisedly washed-out by comparison.
It's as if Bertolucci recognized the Siddhartha story for what it is—an essential world-myth, a beautiful story that has informed countless other stories (and life stories) over the years, but one that, just because it's so archetypal and basic, may be too skeletal and basic to stand on its own. (Once upon a time, a friend of mine wanted to collaborate on a screenplay. Heavily under the influence of some lectures by Joseph Campbell, he began in what struck me as a backward direction: he knew he wanted to make a film about a hero, a hero who comes home from something—a battle or a crusade, something—and finds his old world changed. My friend had everything— archetypes in line, collective-unconscious themes, the hero with a thousand faces— everything except a story.)
So Bertolucci (who has story credit—the screenplay is credited to Rudy Wurlitzer and Mark Peploe) uses the modern plot as variation on the hero's journey of separation, experience, and enlightenment. A jump cut from an opening sequence in Bhutan takes us from a wooden bridge at an ancient monastery to the winding bridges of a Seattle freeway, where Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng) has come to find the little Buddha candidate. Thereafter, Vittorio Storaro shoots the city as though it were perpetually green in the gills, with a bluish-bleak light that stands (indeed, waves its arms and hollers) as the spiritual emptiness of the modern world.
This light informs the best scene of the Seattle section, when the Tibetan monks visit the home of the Conrads to tell them about the possible lama-dom of their son. The house, which Bertolucci said reminded him "a bit of an Antonioni place," is empty and spare, lighted by windows that all but surround the main room. As the monks sit and talk with the wary Americans, the day slips away into...not dusk, exactly, just the late-afternoon lessening of light, a gradually noticeable darkening of a room without lamps, so that suddenly you can't see the eyes of the people sitting a few feet away. It looks like death. That failing light, the life it seems to take out of a room, has never quite been captured the way Storaro does here.
The rest of the Seattle scheme provides the math for the movie's formula. The Conrads are skeptical, vague moderns (even if their name carries a literary echo of a Western sensibility meeting the oriental and exotic) whose rudderless souls are represented by engineer Dean's empty buildings and the off-screen death of a shadowy friend. That's all we really have—it's supposed to be a children's movie, remember—and to make matters sketchier, the actor who gets to carry most of the freight of this spiritual hollowness is not an actor at all; Chris Isaak has a face that Bertolucci must've delighted in, American and Elvis-y and bemused, but he hasn't got any actor's energy that might have filled in the blueprint of the role.
So we're left with the story of Siddhartha, rapturously told. Another interesting casting here, this one more successful: Keanu Reeves plays Siddhartha, he who becomes enlightened. This dotty and inspired choice has prompted a virtually universal critical reaction, which seems to consist entirely of conceiving a Bill & Ted gag without going to the trouble of actually considering the effect of the casting. (The choice is consistent with a director who can speak movingly of the influences of Raoul Walsh and Renoir in the same sentence—something that most critics are unlikely to be able to do these days.) Some other actor might create a deeper, more sublime portrait of the original Buddha, but Reeves sure looks incredible, a creature between animal and angel, like someone decorating a story on a tapestry.
And Reeves' slightly blank aura is ingratiating here; he seems ready for anything, ready to be filled, ready to jump from his own private Idaho to the Himalayas—you can feel the happy energy of a young Hollywood actor asked to play one of the world's great spiritual leaders. So often in his movies Reeves gives you the feeling he hasn't quite found his own voice—he slips into that odd quasi-British clip, the one Robin Williams adopts when he doesn't know which accent to put on. Here, he isn't required to say all that much, which helps, but even his uninflected voice is appropriate to his unformed character and to the peculiar quality of the ancient sequences: a gorgeous, giddy mishmash of location shooting and Broadway costumes, English dialogue and Indian actors, barefoot ascetics and operatic aesthetics. Bertolucci also dips from the well of Satyajit Ray and Cecil B. DeMille, and magical realism and Jack Kerouac—and the Renoir of The River, I think. (Note to the university professor leading the “Films of Keanu Reeves” course: feel free to use any of these observations as needs be.)
These passages are buoyant, with Bertolucci freely exercising his tendencies toward spectacle. The lushness of the prince's sheltered life, the archetypal revolt against his father's wishes (rendered here with considerable force, as in Bertolucci's other depictions of sons who need to leave or kill their fathers), the hippie romance of shedding all earthly possessions and setting off into the forest: these are comforting, dazzlingly shot (the elephant's legs passing by in foreground as Siddhartha journeys in longshot), gratifying in their familiarity.
Bertolucci ends this section of the film with the FX lightshow, great balls of fire slicing through the air, a host of Kurosawa shadow warriors firing off arrows that turn to fistfuls of lotus blossoms as they fall near the meditating Siddhartha. It sounds as if it could be awful, but it's not. This is the part where the poet takes the simplicity of things and makes them his own. Bertolucci loves those lotus blossoms, he loves the wooden bowls that float on various waters in different moments of the film. He has the nonbeliever's enthusiasm for the myths and trappings of faith, and there's a luminous clarity to these leaves from a children's book. But if they tell of a mystery, they are not especially mysterious in themselves—that's what I miss about Little Buddha as a film by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Both Jesse in the modern story and Siddhartha in the ancient have a moment when they run down an alley and discover a world away from their fathers. Both happen to watch a potter spinning wet clay into a fluted vase; raw matter becomes art, the earth's glop is shaped by the aesthetic touch. This is fine for a children's book, but the easiness of the parallel is somehow disappointing.
By the way, Jean-Luc Godard had a film in the Seattle Festival, too, and it also took a godly myth into the present day. Hélas pour moi has Gérard Depardieu acting out a Greek legend at the edge of a Swiss lake, in Godard's best film since Hail Mary. I doubt that Godard thought he was making a film for children, as much of the movie, especially the first couple of reels, is casually impenetrable. But there is at least a childlike eye, a dazzling lucidity in every frame. The elemental colors of the seaside become, under Godard's gaze, the brushstrokes of an old master, and the ancient tale—or at least those parts of it that are recognizable in Godard's deconstructing approach— becomes a furtive and mysterious event, livelier and funnier than anything in Little Buddha.
In his press conference, Bertolucci mused about his own decision to open his films up to a wider audience at the end of the 1960s ("In those days we thought an audience was a sign of decadence"), and the different path that Godard has taken. "My guru, Godard," said Bertolucci, "he’s like a diamond which doesn't need a light from the sun, he shines with his own interior light, beautiful and sublime...he's just not interested in communication anymore." There was something wistful in Bertolucci's sentiment, as though he loved his Oscar but envied his master's devotion to the monk-like contemplation of imponderables.
David Thomson, in an evocative piece on The Sheltering Sky in this magazine (May-June 91), wrote of Bertolucci's casting of Paul Bowles as a wiseman-narrator: "It is a dire error to put a guru on screen." Little Buddha makes it twice in a row. But balance this with a stray comment Bertolucci made, when he was speaking in Seattle of his interest in Buddhist philosophy: "...and there's a feeling of serenity, which makes me feel quite anxious, actually... ." Bertolucci has described his last three films as an Eastern trilogy, and Little Buddha is surely a marking-off: He leaves the story of the Buddha with the hero sitting under the bodhi tree. But actually the enlightened one lived for many years, with more wanderings and teachings yet to come. The cinema's sensuous intellectual has paths to take and bridges to cross still.
July 18, 2025
