Pilgrims Progress
East meets west in lyrical Bhutanese fable "Travellers & Magicians"

Imagine a tiny mountain village hidden away in the kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas, the refuge of peasant farmers and Buddhist monks. It's the last place you'd expect to find any vestige of Western culture. But the perniciousness of the West is the launching point for Travellers & Magicians, a lyrical, unassuming little fable from Bhutanese filmmaker Khyentse Norbu. Himself a monk and incarnate lama in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Norbu's first film was The Cup, in 1999, a whimsical story of Buddhist monks in thrall to the World Cup soccer finals.

Norbu's films display a great deal of savvy about opposing cultures in transition. Travellers & Magicians revolves around Dondup (Tshewang Dendup), a young official in a remote village who's nuts about America; he wears long hair and gunboat American running shoes, papers his walls with posters of hot babes, and plays air guitar to rock tapes on his boom box. He thinks the village he's been posted to is a drag ("no movies, no restaurants, no cool girls," he frets) and drops everything to journey to a neighboring town where arrangements have been made for him to emigrate to the U.S.

But Dondup misses his bus, and as the bus schedule is so erratic, he reluctantly falls in with a band of pilgrims walking the remote mountain roads toward the town: a philosophical monk (Sonam Kinga), an old peasant selling apples, and an aging papermaker and his pretty daughter (Sonam Lhamo), who has left school to care for him. Camping by the roadside at night, they make most of the journey on foot, occasionally hitching rides on a variety of ever more rattletrap conveyances (like a horse cart that seems to be powered by a lawnmower.)

Dondup is too busy fuming at their slow pace to notice the extraordinary natural beauty unfolding all around them—from vast green mountain gorges to delicate wildflowers. To pass the time, the monk begins telling them all a story-within-the-film, which Norbu weaves in and out of the main story. Chuckling that Dondup's vision of an America he's never seen is " a dreamland," the monk tells the story of Tashi (Lhakpa Dorji), another restless youth chasing a dream. An elder son sent to a school where the principal subject seems to be learning folkloric magic spells. Tashi never studies and cares only for girls.

Lost in the woods one stormy night, Tashi is taken in by an irritable, reclusive old man who lives alone with his sultry, much younger wife, Deki (Deki Yangzom, stunning with her elegantly chiseled features, broad round shoulders and womanly proportions). Too unskilled to find the road home by himself, and troubled when he overhears the tyrannical husband shouting at his wife, Tashi's visit lengthens into days, and weeks—with results as dire and steamy as any classic film noir movie.

The simplicity of the storyline and the use of non-professional actors (all of whom embody their roles to perfection) belie the sophistication of Norbu's filmmaking. While the travellers' story is filmed with almost documentary-style realism, the Tashi story is shot in eerie, dreamlike sepia tone, highlighted by mysterious smoky blues and the rusty terra cotta reds of slowly kindling emotions. The monk's wry kidding about Dondup's inability to value his own culture is never heavy-handed. (When a sleek modern car speeds past them on the road without stopping—driven by the same actress who plays femme fatale Deki—the monk observes, "She looks like she's going to America too.")

Norbu peppers the film with plenty of ironic humor and regional exotica. (Dondup misses his bus because of a crowd of merrymakers hoisting aloft a phallus effigy at a village festival; the travellers take refuge under a roadside cliff painted with vivid demon faces.) Even in serene Bhutan, Norbu tells us, progress, like Dondup, is on the move. Travellers & Magicians is a parable of transition that begs to consider the here and now while racing toward the future.

TRAVELLERS & MAGICIANS With Tshewang Dendup and Deki Yangzom. Written and directed by Khyentse Norbu. A Zeitgeist Films release. (Not rated) 108 minutes. In Dzongkha with English subtitles. (***)
Review published in Good Times, February 10, 2005