Lhasa Is Missing: Asian American Film Festival (Part 2)

Dreaming Lhasa (2005, Dir. Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam)

Tibet -- the name conjures a multitude of impressions. Spirituality, oppression, resistance, beauty, poverty, epic landscapes, hardy people, sadness, hope. Above all, there's the ongoing Tibet "problem," and its currency among Western spiritual and political circles. When I visited Lhasa in September 2001, mere days after 9/11, it was impossible to ignore the surveillance cameras mounted on the rooftops in the Tibetan quarter of town, or my trip to Drigung Til Monastery, a place which my Lonely Planet guide claimed had a few hundred monks, but which only housed 20 when I arrived -- all the others had fled or had been arrested by the authorities. And then there were the small moments, as when a young Drigung Til monk listened to Radiohead on my minidisc player and asked innocently if he could keep the player, or when the same monk showed the cuts on his head and explained that they were the result of a little brawl with some of the local villagers. Or on a more somber level, witnessing the sky burial of a small boy, his mummified body lying in the monastery courtyard, monks chanting for hours on end before the actual ceremony.

It is easy to forget moments like these when confronted with the more global implications of what Tibet is and what it should be -- and any film that tackles the subject of Tibet is faced with this conundrum. How to fashion a cogent statement about Tibet's life and times, while also presenting the authentic colors of this life? Setting aside the well-intentioned yet glossy efforts of outsider filmmakers (Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun), only one narrative film in recent years has attempted to pull the curtain back: Windhorse (1991), a fascinating study of alienation, subjugation, and cultural confusion in Lhasa that was nevertheless strident in its polemics.

Dreaming Lhasa, the first feature film by noted documentarians Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam (based on a script by Sonam), is no less vague in its message -- our hearts are clearly meant to be with the dispossessed and exiled Tibetans hungry for freedom and home -- but cannily sidesteps the issue by locating the action in India, specifically the Tibetan refugee town of Dharamsala, as well as detours to Jaipur, Delhi, and Clement Town. Rather than a story about place and nation, this is a story about people, memories, and obligations.

The story hinges on a well-worn convention: the delivery of an important item to a missing person. Tibetan by blood but NYC-bred Karma (Tenzin Chokyi Gyatso) is in Dharamsala along with her local pal Jigme (Tenzin Jigme) to film interviews of Tibetan refugees and their stories of resistance and torture. In a few brief strokes, we see that Karma is feisty, confident, and concerned about her grant, her daughter, and her boyfriend in approximately that order. But the standard worldly concerns fall away when she comes across refugee Dhondup (Jampa Kalsang), an ex-monk who now trudges around in the standard flimsy gray suit and red vest that is the civilian uniform of lower-class types across Tibet, and China. Dhondup has a charm box belonging to an acquaintance of his late mother, and his mission is to find the man in India and deliver the box.

Somewhat against her will, Karma is drafted into assisting Dhondup with his search, and as they follow the trail of the missing man, they journey into his past as they happen upon an ex-wife, a belligerent restaurant owner, a hunger protestor, a travel agent, a sweater salesman -- all of them Tibetan, all of them with their own stories, past and present. Following the perfect circle of a prayer wheel, the protagonists' quest takes them on a roundabout journey that ends where it starts, with a final revelation. But Dreaming Lhasa doesn't qualify as a spiritual journey; rather, it is a collection of snapshots, where surprising anecdotes and tidbits of knowledge (i.e., CIA involvement with Tibetan rebellions) bubble to the surface.

As documentarians, Sarin and Sonam bring a convincing truthfulness to these stories, which are no doubt based on real accounts. They are somewhat less adept at the conventions of a fictional narrative. The film is saddled with some clunky expository dialogue, especially near the beginning, and the plot sometimes meanders. We are meant to see Karma arrive at a greater understanding about herself and her people, but there is no clear-cut moment of illumination, no definable character arc. Gyatso is a likeable performer (amazingly enough, she was plucked from obscurity at a Maryland bank for the role), but she doesn't have the resources to present what the script does not provide. A semi-romance with Dhondup is touched on, but Dhondup himself doesn't receive much characterization beyond standard "stolid, noble refugee" poses, although Kalsang brings plenty of rumpled dignity to the part. (Dhondup can be seen as the grown-up version of the rebellious young'un Kalsang played in Windhorses -- wiser in the ways of the world, less prickly, but just as committed to doing the right thing.)

Fortunately, the filmmakers inject playfulness into what could otherwise have been a somber tale. Jigme is a breath of fresh air, puncturing the proceedings with snarky comments about foreigners and whiny Tibetans, even as he puts the moves on Karma and the local tourist hotties. Alas, he must undergo a conversion from cynical outsider to fervent free-Tibet supporter, but his hip ambivalence is welcome. In the same vein, we're presented with amusing cultural dissonances -- native boys jeering at Karma as a "foreigner" even when she insists to the contrary; a Tibetan refugee who has his U.S. visa expedited by pretending to be a monk; disco brawls giving way to slow dances with Cowboy Junkies music and then to plaintive folk laments; or the sight of a travel agent switching conversations and languages midstream on his phone lines, Tibetan by birth but happily international in vocation. The story doesn't pick up much steam as it progresses, but in its looseness, its delicate accretion of details, its movement towards breadth (if not depth) of shared experiences, its casual glimpses of magnificent mountains and crowded alleyways, it slowly takes hold.

It all comes back to Lhasa: it is talked about in the course of the movie, but rarely mentioned by name. Jigme gets to rock out with a home-grown tune titled "The Dream," but the dreams of these characters are not necessarily about home, or political imperatives. In its tentative but nevertheless engrossing way, Dreaming Lhasa posits a Tibet without the Tibet, where a story or an anecdote proves more substantial than Karma's filmed footage of natives telling her how brutal it was "over there." As she pulls out on a bus at film's end, we ask ourselves, Whither her documentary? Whither Lhasa? and have no answers. Instead, we have tales and shards of memory, a nation reduced to personal meanderings -- a fascinating conundrum in itself.