Kundun features an amazing and sympathetic cast of Tibetan nationals, many of them Buddhist monks and none of them professional actors. The story of the Dali Lama is the story of these people. Scorsese tells that story episodically with heroic cinematography (courtesy of Roger Deakin, Director of Photography and winner of Best Cinematography awards for the film from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics, with Moroccan landscapes standing in for the Tibetan), but like the Buddhist image of a finger pointing at the moon, the movie can only allude to the crush of cultural, political and spiritual forces that have shaped the Dali Lama's life. Similarly, the movie's caricature of Mao Tse Tung is sinister and unnerving, but un-real in its single, weirdly Andy Kauffman-like dimension. The movie's portrait of the Dali Lama – and of his nemesis, Mao – is inevitably incomplete, but it supports the movie's operative sense that a story worth telling is worth telling in part... In contrast, the minimalist sound track by Philip Glass puts a distracting ostinato rhythm on top of the narrative's epic sweep, proving that – in addition to being "more" – minimalist compositions can be "too much". Simply put, Glass's music succeeds less well than it did for Koyaanisqatsi.

Kundun is distributed by Disney, which – perhaps by now – has opened an amusement park in China. To placate the Chinese government, which was unhappy about the movie, Disney is said to have promoted Kundun less broadly than its other films. And in fact, as a result of making Kundun, the Chinese government has banned Scorsese from traveling to Tibet.

3 Beatles rating

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