LITTLE BUDDHA (viewed on Blu-ray)
I first saw this film 30 years ago in the cut version (123 minutes rather than 140) released by Miramax. I enjoyed it, but felt it was a touch ragged in places. Years later, I encountered on Netflix (before they became the Netflix they are today) the uncut version, and was rather proud to see that the jaggedness I had noticed was, in fact, exactly where the Miramax cuts occurred. The film has never been available from any American companies, and Imprint in Australia is the source of the Blu-ray I watched (Australia was also the source of one of the only DVD releases the film received).
This viewing confirmed my belief that LITTLE BUDDHA is Bertolucci’s best film. Jettisoning his usual interest areas/obsessions of psychodrama, sex, and Marxism, Bertolucci is freer than he he ever was, and his collaboration with Vittorio Storaro reaches its peak. Recently, I saw the 4K restoration of THE CONFORMIST (in theater), and I came to feel that the film was too beautiful–as if visual ravishment were the compensation offered by Bertolucci for narrative sexual anxiety and political impotence. Undergoing psychoanalysis was crucial for Bertolucci, but I think it caused him to turn almost all of his protagonists into case studies–and many of these case studies, along with their attendant sexual behaviors, have not aged well.
Losing the sexual component seems to have allowed Bertolucci and Storaro to turn the beauty down just a notch–allowing for an integration of image, sound, and narrative they had never achieved before. In a Sight and Sound interview, Bertolucci points out the importance of the first words spoken in the film: “Once upon a time,” which makes LITTLE BUDDHA a fable of the present moment–a fable during which a fable about a previous moment is told. These two fables–the search for the reincarnation of a famed lama (present) and the story of Siddhartha’s enlightenment (past)–are intercut until the moment when Bertolucci has them play out side-by-side in a single image–the past and the present interpenetrating as Buddhism teaches, and dualism (symbolized by cross-cutting) breaking down into non-dualism (symbolized by the integrated image).
I also find LITTLE BUDDHA to be the culmination of Bertolucci’s “Tragedy of a Ridiculous X” film series:
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Fascist–THE CONFORMIST
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Widower–LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Landowner & Peasant–NOVECENTO/1900
TRAGEDY OF A RIDICULOUS MAN
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Emperor–THE LAST EMPEROR
Tragedy of Ridiculous Expatriates–THE SHELTERING SKY
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Architect–LITTLE BUDDHA
In LITTLE BUDDHA, Bertolucci decenters the ridiculous character–Dean Conrad, our architect–and allows an alternative to a ridiculous existence to arise–in this instance, the story of the architect’s son, who is possibly the reincarnation of a Tibetan lama (a fact confirmed late in the film).
I still have to work out much of my analysis–my viewing of the disc over the weekend was the confirmation I had been waiting many years to (hopefully) receive. Bertolucci himself said that he was an amateur Buddhist at best, and in his last four films he goes back to his usual subjects (sex/politics) and location (Europe). But this most far-reaching of his explorations–both in terms of narrative and cinematic form–is the pinnacle of his art.
n.b.: The Sight and Sound interview can be found among the collections of articles/interviews with Bertolucci below. In my estimation, it is one of the most lucid director interviews I have ever read. Bertolucci’s intelligence is vast, and he knew exactly what he was doing. It seems that it was audiences and critics who were not up to his speed.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/bernardo-bertolucci
