‘Kundun’ at 25: Martin Scorsese’s Portrait Of The Dalai Lama As A Young Man

The French filmmaking great Jean Renoir took to India in 1951 for The River, the country’s first color production and his last under the auspices of Hollywood. The studio reps from United Artists wanted an exotified extravaganza awash in the eye-popping colors of the West’s imagined East, but with guidance from assistant director Satyajit Ray and a handful of non-professional actors hired in the area, Renoir brought his benefactors something earthier and more grounded. On the banks of the Ganges, an English family running a jute mill gradually acclimates to their surroundings on a spiritual level, coming to appreciate the circularity of Hinduism as they watch lives being lost and created. Writing about The River for Criterion’s Top 10 list guest column, Martin Scorsese described Renoir’s masterpiece of cultural exchange as “a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world.”

In his continuing quest to make one of every type of movie like Noah stocking his ark, Scorsese also set a course for the subcontinent to make his own reverent tribute to Asian faiths. He wanted to shoot Kundun — a biopic chronicling the younger years of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, released twenty-five years ago this month — in India, knowing that working on location in a Chinese-occupied Tibet would be impossible, but officials gave him the runaround for five months before responding by officially declining to respond. The production decamped to the city of Ouarzazate in Morocco, where the Atlas Film Studios lot would confer the same desert grandeur previously on display in Lawrence of Arabia, though Scorsese maintained a link to his setting through a cast filled with the descendants of exiled Tibetan monks.

The most significant connection, however, would be a deeper religious attunement to the notion of ephemerality so admired by Renoir during his time in the region. As America’s preeminent Christian cineaste, Scorsese could identify with the profound conviction of the Buddhists and their feelings of inadequacy before a lofty standard for holiness. And albeit from a personal and geographical distance, he was just as enraptured with the aspect most alien to Catholicism: the cyclical patterns of eternity, under which all things are destroyed and remade with the serene patience of the monks delicately designing and blowing away sand mandalas in the breathtaking slow-mo sequences that bookend the film. Each Dalai Lama’s lifespan on the mortal plane, Tibet’s oppression under a communist yoke — it’s all temporary, in forms reincarnated ad infinitum to the point of a segmented permanence. Coming from a man preoccupied with finality, his filmography’s conclusions assuming the shape of tarnished victories or noble defeats, this idea sticks out as anomalous, perhaps even aspirational. Kundun and The Age of Innocence may be the go-to counterexamples when doofuses accuse Scorsese of only making gangster pictures, but his character study abroad is less an outlier in terms of genre than for its abiding system of belief.

In a 1998 interview with Scorsese for Film Comment, critic Gavin Smith pegged Kundun (the Tibetan word for “presence” and formal title of the Dalai Lama) as an inversion of The Last Temptation of Christ, an origin story for an earthbound vessel of divine will that sees an enlightened young man aging into self-doubt instead of the other way around. At the impressionable stage of development during which a child will believe anything they’re told, the boy born Lhamo Thondup commands the utmost esteem from an emissary upon correctly identifying an array of objects he owned in a past life. In response to the royal treatment, he accepts his own designation as the chosen one as readily as a kid accepts the sky being blue, his certitude tested once he hits puberty and faces his greatest existential trial in Mao Zedong’s army and ideology. “Religion is poison,” Mao says with a Cheshire Cat smile, announcing himself as a villain in his opposition to religiosity itself, the one international currency in the cinema of Scorsese.

Speaking of money: during an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien around this time, the host asked Scorsese what he’d do with a Titanic-sized budget upwards of $200 million, to which he replies without missing a beat that he’d probably only need to use about $60 million and could then pocket the rest. Blunt showbiz narrative-building promoted the image of Kundun crushed beneath the colossal prow of James Cameron’s record-shattering disaster epic released one week earlier, left a box-office dud with a spotty critical record (not helped by many white reviewers’ view of the Dalai Lama’s life and times as minor-work esoterica) best defined by Christopher Moltisanti’s yelled-from-afar consolation of “Marty! Kundun! I liked it!” on The Sopranos. But what have we learned from the Buddha if not that money isn’t everything, or really anything? In one of the playful refutations of big-budget filmmaking that’s cast Scorsese as the Antichrist to a caste of comic book enthusiasts, he suggested that spectacle can be managed without shoveling cash into a coal furnace, though he’d already proven his point.

The sprawling scale of Kundun’s metaphysical vantage, stretching back to the first Dalai Lama in the fourteenth century, matches an aesthetic ornateness rivaled by few of Scorsese’s films. The four Oscar nominations also serve as a handy guide to the key collaborators contributing to the expansive, borderline psychedelic splendor of a unified vision. Cinematographer Roger Deakins works in breathtaking wide shots that render landscapes geometric, their lines as elaborate as the designs in the textiles and temple walls of double-dutied costumer and art director Dante Ferretti. Soaring above it all is Philip Glass’ undulating score, its primal majesty informed by the sound of the Tibetan dungchen horn said by early explorers to transport the listener back to the womb. The fleeting flashes of transcendence come through the synthesis of all these cooperating beauties in arresting maximalist compositions, expressed both in the awed close-ups of a masked dance routine and the terrible tessellation of a monk massacre photographed from above.

Kundun’s legacy is inextricable from its reprehensible treatment by presiding studio Disney, which decisively turned on their own project as the executives formulated plans to bring a theme park to the burgeoning Chinese market. Hoping to save face with his prospective business partners, Disney CEO Michael Eisner deemed Scorsese’s devotional hymn a “stupid mistake” and added, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it. Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.” Disneyland Shanghai would open in 2016; following decades of advocacy for the cause of Tibetan autonomy, screenwriter Melissa Mathison would pass away one year earlier. This would be the first sign of a craven amorality in the Mouse that’s only worsened in the years since, most recently manifested in the decision to shoot the live-action Mulan in China’s Xinjiang province, which also hosts internment camps for China’s persecuted Uighur Muslim ethnic minority.

For all its wiring to various hot buttons, Kundun has a cleansing meditative quality that makes it a stealthily perfect Christmas movie, oriented as it is around the nativity of a messenger for a higher power. The foundational principles of the Catholicism that Scorsese was born into and the Buddhism he respectfully toured aren’t at odds, their shared emphases on discipline, magnanimity, and humility articulated in differing practices. The Dalai Lama’s basic mission of guiding the soul puts him in line with the naughty-versus-nice spirit of Yuletide, the lone major American holiday with a grounding in ethical mandates. Our perennial striving to land on Santa’s good list is just a more transactional, mercenary take on Buddhism’s unending pursuit of the self-actualization contained within nirvana. This time of year, we all get to feel a little like Scorsese’s protagonists, cataloguing our guilt and vowing to expunge it with a new year’s fresh start. Redemption, whether achieved in this life or the next, is the reason for the season.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.