Martin Scorsese has always shown a deep reverence and appreciation for Asian cinema, as reflected in his championing of Asian auteurs like Edward Yang, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Through his World Cinema Foundation, Scorsese has rescued and restored many important Asian films, including A Brighter Summer Day and The Housemaid. With Kundun (1997) Scorsese made his first Asian themed film, and the result is one of his emotionally resonant and moving films.
Kundun is a biopic about Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. The film explores the Dalai Lama’s life from his youth in Tibet up to his exile to India in 1959. Like Scorsese’s other spiritually themed films The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence, Kundun explores the topic of religious persecution. After the Communist government of China took over Tibet, atrocities against the Dalai Lama and his followers were committed, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee to India.
Throughout Kundun, Scorsese shows the struggles the Dalai Lama faced to maintain his practice of non-violent resistance. As the spiritual leader of his followers, the Dalai Lama has to protect his own people against the violent and oppressive actions of the Chinese invaders. Since the Dalai Lama obviously does not have access to a military or arms to defend himself, he tries at first to meet face to face with Mao Zedong to negotiate a peace deal.
This results in Mao furthering his prosecution of the Tibetan natives, and lecturing the Dalai Lama about how religion is poison. This is similar to the Japanese Inquisitor in Silence chastising Andrew Garfield’s Jesuit priest about how “the tree of Christianity withers in Japanese soil” because it has been poisoned. Indeed, both Kundun and Silence explore how peaceful protagonists confront and deal with oppressive, violent outside forces which view religion as something to be eliminated.
In a Scorsese gangster film, the protagonists naturally will counter violence with even more violent acts, resulting in a vicious circle of incessant death and destruction. Kundun is Scorsese’s first attempt to explore how one can fight violence with peaceful protest and compassion. Amidst the brutal oppression of his times, the Dalai Lama hopes that his example of compassionate resistance will result in peace.
We never see explicit depictions of the violence committed against the Tibetan people, except for one brief vision by the Dalai Lama of the corpses of his fellow monks. Instead, Scorsese fills Kundun with quiet but visually astounding imagery inspired by Buddhist philosophy, such as a breathtaking scene of an elaborate sand mandala being created and blown away. Kundun is an almost ethnographic exploration of the Dalai Lama’s culture, as Scorsese faithfully depicts the many rituals and traditions of the Tibetan people.
Throughout the film, Scorsese emphasizes the fragility of the Dalai Lama’s peaceful existence. The film’s earlier, more elegiac scenes of the Dalai Lama’s youth contrast with the more disruptive, frantic scenes of the Chinese army and government gradually infiltrating Tibet, such as an astonishing scene of the Chinese army marching ominously through the streets. This temporal nature of existence is emphasized throughout Kundun, as Scorsese is showing how life itself is transitory, and so are violence and suffering.
The last act of Kundun, as the Dalai Lama escapes to India, is an almost wordless sequence of events that depicts both the tragedy and ultimate hope of the Dalai Lama’s life. Just as he is about to cross the border into safety, he speaks these haunting words, “I think I am a reflection, like the moon on water. When you see me, and I try to be a good man, you see yourself.” Following the example of these words by the Dalai Lama, Scorsese emphasizes images of peace instead of violence in Kundun in the hopes of reflecting human nature’s deeper good.
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