The most conspicuous examples of this approach to politics are two current big Hollywood movies: the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s $70 million Seven Years in Tibet, based on Heinrich Harrer’s popular book of 1953, and Martin Scorsese’s $28 million Kundun, which is more or less an authorized biography of the Dalai Lama in his early years. (“Kundun,” which means “Presence,” is the word Tibetans use in addressing the Dalai Lama.) The Annaud movie makes no bones about presenting a version of Tibetan history and Buddhism for the masses; it embellishes Harrer’s adventure story (which it turns into a contemporary Hollywood therapy session) and takes liberties with history. In many of Annaud’s earlier films, such as The Bear and Quest for Fire, the natural scenery, the colors, the faces of the crowds have been more eloquent than any of the actors, and, in Seven Years, one recalls that its screenwriter’s most celebrated film was the therapy-affirming The Prince of Tides. Yet I’ve got to admit that this movie (filmed mostly in Argentina) conveys the jostling, grimy enchantment of Lhasa with extraordinary fidelity, looking, if not always feeling, uncannily like the willow-lined town I first visited in 1985, before the Chinese had razed nearly all the buildings of Old Lhasa. Annaud is well known for his careful research, and in this case the 17,000 photos he took around the Himalayas, and the 9000-square-foot recreation of the Potala Palace’s Hall of Good Deeds that he built in an abandoned garlic warehouse near the industrial town of Mendoza, convey, with a poignant exactitude, a Tibet that exists now only in memory.
Harrer’s book was a straightforward account of how a German mountain climber, interned in a British camp in India during World War II, escaped to find himself in the “most mysterious land on earth,” as one typical writer still calls it.4 The filmmakers have decided, however, to turn his story into a familiar, feel-good tale of an arrogant Western “selfish brat” healed by the selflessness of Tibetans. This means that they take an oddly hostile approach to Harrer (portraying him as a bungler who can’t even speak Tibetan, for example, when by his own account Harrer soon gained a working fluency), and willfully pushing into the story all the things he took care to leave out: his wife back home, the son from whom he was estranged, his use by the Nazis as a blond symbol of Aryan manhood. The result is that they make a psychological case history out of a story whose great charm lies in its freedom from psychology. The strength of Harrer’s book is that it evokes a pre-Freudian pastoral in which people aren’t particularly vexed about their inner lives; all the personal transformation in the book takes place between the lines, almost without its author’s knowledge. The bluff, skeptical mountain climber who describes public floggings, almost epidemic venereal disease, and monks running “a stern dictatorship” nonetheless falls under a sunlit spell of garden parties and kindly hosts and everyday life in an innocent world (“Tibet does not belong to the World Postal Union,” he writes, “and its postal arrangements are somewhat complicated”).
Harrer was entirely a man of his time, and the evident affection he develops for Tibetans—whom he sees as rough-and-ready outdoorsmen like himself—is made the more affecting precisely because he couldn’t help talking of “European superiority.” As monks and medicine men burned ceremonial dolls over the Dalai Lama’s dying father, he worries, “To my way of thinking, they would have done better to call in the English doctor.” The tale of the no-nonsense adventurer who somehow ends up writing “I often think I can still hear the wild cries of geese and cranes and the beating of their wings as they fly over Lhasa in the clear cold moonlight” is more remarkable than the more conventional story of redemption recorded in the film.
Annaud also distorts Tibet’s history by shifting the twenty years of outright Chinese brutality (much of it occurring during the Cultural Revolution, and now repudiated, however expediently, by the Chinese) to coincide with Harrer’s stay in Lhasa, which ended in late 1950. The scenes of Chinese attacking peace-loving Tibetans through clouds of gunsmoke ignore a long history of negotiation. It’s worth recalling that in Harrer’s admittedly loose account, the Dalai Lama himself is described as being born in “China” (as the eastern province of Amdo could sometimes be regarded), and, in one of the very few references to the Chinese attacks in his book, Harrer declares that “it is fair to say that during the present war, the Chinese troops had shown themselves disciplined and tolerant, and Tibetans who had been captured and then released were saying how well they had been treated.” Again, in its eagerness to impart a lesson, the film takes some shortcuts.