Nirvana's Last Stand

IT'S NOT REALLY FAIR to be too cynical about Eastern religion: whatever it is, it's at least a complex bundle of ideas not simply grasped by Westerners or novices. It's a bit easier to raise eyebrows at Hermann Hesse's novella Siddhartha, but still, Hesse--who also wrote Journey to the East, seems to know something about Hindu mysticism, or at least to approach his subject with a certain degree of intellectual honesty and sophistication.

It's impossible, however, to leave Conrad Rooks's filmed Siddhartha without gingerly reaching for one's wallet to make sure it's still there. This unspeakable insult to the cinema and to the India it depicts has all the imaginative variety of a Hare Krishna marathon in Harvard Square, and the P.T. Barnum mentality lately put to profitable use by a noted fifteen-year old mob leader who drives a Rolls-Royce. Never has the search for eternal cosmic wisdom been so short (an hour and a half), seemed so long (an eternity), and revealed so little.

The projector starts and the screen stays black--we hear a "haunting," "exotic" flute and soon the clatter of oxen's feet. After an interminably long time, the camera finds the cattle, and immediately pans in on the cloven hooves scuffing through the dusty soil. Thereby Rooks has introduced what turns out to be a major motif in the movie--feet. The film's fascination with this part of the anatomy is endless. When Siddhartha pads solemnly through the forest in search of you know what, we become familiar with his dirty toes. And when Siddhartha has 'crossed the river" (this, by the way, is symbolic) into the fleshpots of the city, countless heels dance decadently across expensive rugs.

Sample dialogue:

I have sat here and listened to the river. It has taught me a great deal. It has filled me with great thoughts.

People are forever telling Siddhartha how clever he is, and this is without a doubt one of his moments of genius. The phrase "great deal" is crucial: "alot" would have been too flippant; no contractions allowed, no "don'ts" and "gimmes" when you're searching for the Truth. But the part about learning from the river is more telling.

THROUGHOUT this film people say how much they are learning, what great trials they have weathered. But we never learn what it is that everyone is so excited and enlightened about. With this unfortunate handicap, we have trouble feeling convinced when someone has a major life-transforming experience with no more warning, motivation or inducement than a wistful look or a quick crosslegged gaze into the horizon. Siddhartha and his friends, wherever they go, seem to "learn" with inordinate alacrity--they will convert immediately, throwing themselves at the feet of and dedicating their lives to someone they have known for all of 30 seconds.

The camera loves to show what seems like hours of impassioned dialogue--between student and teacher, for example--but from a distance, with no sound coming from their mouths (only some unintelligible background chanting). Anyway, you're supposed to get the idea that it's Heavy Discourse going on.

At the end of the picture, when Siddhartha's lover, whom he has not seen in many moons, is dying (bitten by a cobra), she asks him, "Have you attained it?" Siddhartha doesn't even have to answer, and her eyes fill with tears of joy as she leaves for what Siddhartha pointedly observes is her own special "nirvana." Meanwhile, back in our by now very uncomfortable seats, we are wondering what the hell he has attained in the previous hour and a half, except perhaps for too much knowledge of the Kama Sutra (the audience shares this overabundance of scintillating information). Maybe this is really a movie about positions.

The empty profundity of the script is appropriately paralleled by the craft of the director. When Siddhartha is going through his dionysian period, we are treated to a wealth of prison images--birdcages, open temples with arabesque walls, etc. Doors are continually opening on the screen for no apparent reason other than to show us that transition is going on in Siddhartha's spiritual development. The director gives us a succession of gratuitous images which are supposed to be pregnant with meaning, but what we see is only a collection of boring objects.

THIS KIND of thing gets tiresome as soon as the film begins, but gradually the philosophical gruel becomes downright insidious. If one actually were to try to excavate one idea from Siddhartha, it might be that "everything changes," (they also say that "everything returns" in the same breath--the logic isn't clear) "like the river"--a direct steal from Heraclitus's idea that one never steps into the same river twice. At any rate the logic of the film reveals that one should not fight time, or chase wealth, but live in the present and for the moment. There are no "goals": do not grasp and you will not suffer.

This is all fine, especially for Siddhartha, who has no possessions, magically lives off the forest, and is automatically taken into the bosom of every household and every bed he approaches in his travels without so much as an introduction. But when the implication is that "this is all ye know and need to know"--the ultimate panacea--one wonders about the starving Indian peasants who this film loves to display dancing and smoking dope: They're in rags, but they're spiritually free.

One would like to say that Siddhartha is beautiful to look at. It was filmed in Northern India, and clearly the film-makers were trying very hard for breathtaking landscapes--they blur flowers, set suns galore, swoop in on reflecting bodies of water. But their idea of painting a humid. ethereal environment is fuzzy backgrounds, mist, and drippy trees. When they try to make a visual delight out of five straight minutes of someone being cremated (the embers glowing in the night), the effect is aesthetically negligible.

The original material for Siddhartha--the book itself--was no gem, but the basic setting and action has potential. Louis Malle (Phantom India) and Jean Renoir (The River), along with Satyajit Ray and his Apu trilogy, have shown that India's culture is fascinating on film. And Kon Ichikawa made a brilliant Japanese film called The Burmese Harp about a soldier burying the unknown dead after the World War II defeat, giving the story of a religious ascetic roaming the countryside incredible resonance and conviction.

One's not exactly sure just what audience Siddhartha was trying to reach. Hesse's work was a big book on the campuses in the mid-sixties, but unless you have been taking acid every day for the last five years, suffer from terminal brain disease, and have felt an uncontrollable inclination lately to find out what "Millenium '73" is all about, Siddhartha is not likely to do much for your level of consciousness.