Milarepa, Magician, Murderer, Saint

Am reading The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa to find out why the Dalai Lama is moved to tears at the story, and am watching some films about him on google video. The great saint of Tibet was a moral failure as many of us have been, and may give us some key as to how to do pennance and transform our lives. :)


Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint
Directed by Neten Chokling
Written by Chokling, Tenzing Choyang Gyari
Starring Jamyang Lodro, Kelsang Chukie Tethong
Metro Cinema, $10
Fri, Dec 14, Sun, Dec 16, Wed, Dec 19 (7 pm)
Sat, Dec 15, Mon, Dec 17, Tue, Dec 18 (9 pm)


BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com

The only surprise in the first part of Neten Chokling’s Tibetan epic, Milarepa, about one of the land’s most famous saints, is the lightning current of vengeance that crackles through a land so stereotypically associated with transcendental calm.

The story is a version of the age-old fairy tale/hero myth: poor boy is cheated out of his proper inheritance and seeks vengeance. Here, though, in 11th century Tibet, the boy is Thöpaga—destined to become Milarepa—and he’s been robbed of his dead father’s wealth by his heartless aunt and uncle, abetted by their fellow villagers’ inaction. The snuff-sniffing, dice-gambling uncle is even selling off some of the family jewellery. The betrayal means Thöpaga can’t yet marry Zesay. His mother, Kangyen (Kelsang Chukie Tethong), tells Thöpaga (Jamyang Lodro) that he must learn sorcery and return to punish the village with his spells or she will kill herself. On his way to Yungton Trogyei’s temple, Thöpaga is helped by the master’s son, Dharma.

As the film moves from wrath and vengeance—“One day, you will suffer like us,” declares Kangyen—to a rejection of violence and pursuit of enlightenment (the true stuff of Milarepa’s legend, to be dealt with in the second part, due 2009), there’s stunning scenery and a few grand sequences. The film’s main character is the setting, from majestic, icy mountaintops and sandy slopes sweeping down to river plains (India stands in for Tibet). Thöpaga’s vengeance is an aerial explosion, the sky cracking open with flashes of righteous anger. The ending is a calm, careful study of man dwarfed by the grand, near-mystical landscape, flags fluttering in the wind.

Chokling pays careful attention to ritual and to meditation, but offers no real insights into character or culture. The film is patient and steady, its performances quiet and understated, but it’s a plot-plodding piece. Many of the scenes are night-time conversations, ordinary and unsubtle. Thöpaga’s study of magic is skimmed over, and Chokling prefers to show the grand effects, from Trogyei’s materialization out of thin air to Dharma’s kang gyok, where a steady trail of kicked-up dust shows him racing to Thöpaga’s village and back in a day.

Milarepa is by-the-book mythmaking: stately, straightforward and not too interesting. The story is key to Tibetan culture, even to world literature, but falls flat on film, a moody, visual medium, tremendously difficult to rework into a mirror for introspective, spiritual transformation. The upcoming Part Two, where our man in Tibet looks even more inward in his search for enlightenment, would be better left to the page, not tacked onto the big screen like this.