There’s a poster of A Brighter Summer Day hanging in Pawo Choyning Dorji’s dwelling. It’s a tribute to the late Edward Yang, but in addition one thing way more private. “The little girl in the film,” he tells me, “Chang Chen’s little sister… that little girl is my wife.”
There’s one thing nearly sacred in the intimacy of this little apart throughout our dialog that caught me abruptly. And but it appears fairly becoming. The Taiwanese auteur’s legacy of stillness, his emotional persistence, and the method in which he held reminiscence and modernity in the similar breath — all really feel strikingly alive in Pawo’s oeuvre of cinema.
A nonetheless from ‘The Monk and the Gun’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
It’s an inheritance Pawo carries with grace, if not intentionality. “I never went to film school,” he says. “I studied political science.” It was exactly this confluence — learning politics in the U.S. throughout the invasion of Iraq whereas watching his homeland, Bhutan, gently usher in a democratic transition — that sparked one thing deeper in him. “American students would say, it is the duty of America to give democracy to people who don’t have it… the gift of democracy,” he remembers. “I was from a country where we were literally gifted democracy. But we didn’t ask for it. We didn’t fight for it. There was no revolution, no war, and yet we weren’t necessarily ready for it. I don’t even know if we’re ready for it now.”
That stress between the “gift” and the price, between imposed modernity and lived custom, is the soul of The Monk and the Gun, Pawo’s newest political satire. On paper, it’s a farcical telling of a monk in Bhutan tasked with discovering a gun throughout the nation’s first nationwide election. But beneath the comedic conceit lies some crushing perception into how nations wealthy in an interior life, like Bhutan, have risked non secular amnesia in their pursuit of ‘prosperous’ exterior techniques.
“When I premiered the film in Bhutan,” Pawo says, “people were crying. I never expected that. I thought I made a satire. But for Bhutanese audiences, it was something else. One person told me, ‘This reminded us of how, in the pursuit of something we thought we needed, we lost something we already had.’” He continues, “That’s not something I would’ve learned in a political science class. That’s something I only realised at the very end, once the audience showed me what the film really meant.”
Though it’s not simply the political system of his homeland that Pawo interrogates. He’s additionally reckoning with what modernity is doing to its spirit. “If you come to Bhutan, the phallus is a very important part of our culture,” he says. “We are a tantric Buddhist country, and everything has meaning.” In tantric thought, inhibition is the closing barrier to enlightenment, and the answer appears to be extra embarrassment. “If you have water in your ears, a Bhutanese will say: put more water,” he laughs. “You want to destroy inhibition? Put yourself in situations where you constantly feel it. You see a phallus, you feel embarrassed, you feel shy, but that’s okay. Because actually, in the end, nothing exists.”
A nonetheless from ‘The Monk and the Gun’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
Towards the finish of the movie, an American who arrived looking for a firearm leaves with a towering picket phallus. “The gun represents something foreign,” Pawo explains. “Western, modern, but also a bringer of suffering. The phallus, on the other hand, is our tradition. This juxtaposition is no accident. Both are ‘phallic, ’” Pawo says with a half-smile. “Both are masculine. But one represents fear, and the other represents freedom.” More regretfully, the one native to Bhutan is disappearing. “Growing up, they were everywhere. But as we became more modern and Westernised, we began to feel embarrassed by them, and so they vanished. The very thing that was supposed to help us transcend inhibition became the source of it.”
In Pawo’s Bhutan, these symbols are by no means inert and ripple outward personally, politically, and metaphysically. Yet, the street to manifesting these tales onscreen is something however seamless. The Bhutanese movie trade, as he tells me, is nascent, bordering on non-existent. His Oscar-nominated 2019 debut, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, was shot with a single digital camera and no electrical energy. “It was a solar-powered film,” he says, laughing. “Even now, with more recognition, we still truck every piece of equipment in from Delhi.”
Still, Bhutan presents Pawo one thing few different locations may as a non secular floor to face on, at the same time as his gaze grows extra world. Recently, he contributed a phase to Tales of Taipei, a collaborative anthology movie about life in the Taiwanese capital. “In Bhutan, we roll out of bed at eight, make coffee, then discuss what to shoot that day. In Taiwan, the crew was on set at 3 or 4 in the morning. It was quite intense, but also very professional.” Still, Taiwan isn’t international terrain for Pawo. His spouse and kids are Taiwanese and he calls it a second dwelling.
In truth, his total aesthetic sits at a confluence of worlds: East and West, previous and current, custom and transformation. He cites Kore-eda for his realism, Tarantino for his audacity, and, most meaningfully, his personal non secular and artistic mentor, Dzongsar Khyentse Norbu. “He was the one who saw I was a storyteller before I knew it myself,” Pawo says. “His films are deeper, more philosophical, and I once told him my films would be more cheesy in comparison. And he said, ‘Well, if cheesy is done right, it works.’” Indeed, “cheesy” could be the final phrase anybody would use to explain Pawo’s movies. His frames really feel like work. His tales take their time. And his humour, like his politics, comes from deep inside.
Pawo Choyning Dorji behind the scenes of ‘The Monk and the Gun’
| Photo Credit:
Roadside Attractions
Pawo tells me, “You will never see your own eyelashes because they are so close to you” — one thing the Buddha as soon as mentioned. The thought felicitously explains why his movies typically flip inward, trying to find what’s been missed in plain sight. While the world rushes to look outward, to see farther, Pawo appears extra preoccupied with what we’ve stopped noticing up shut. Perhaps that’s the place the spirit of Edward Yang lingers most clearly in his movies. In the tenderness to take a look at one’s personal tradition, to query it with out cruelty, and to carry its contradictions and absurdities with care.
To see clearly. Even particularly, when it’s your personal eyelashes in the approach.
The Monk and the Gun is presently accessible to stream on MUBI
