What Lies Beneath

Rating: Null/10 (16 February 2015)

"It is better to travel well than to arrive." - Buddha
Based on a true story, Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Seven Years in Tibet" stars Brad Pitt as Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer. As he lived in Tibet between the years 1944 and 1951, Harrer witnessed China's "invasion" of Tibet. This "invasion" forced the 14th Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, to flee into India.
"Seven Years" was released in 1997, the same year as Martin Scorsese's "Kundun". Both films present idealised portraits of theocratic, late-feudal Tibet. They romanticise Buddhism, fawn over the Himalayas, and pine nostalgically for Tibetan customs and traditions. In the hands of Annaud and Scorsese, the more radical and so interesting aspects of Buddhism are also ignored.
Orientalism (portrayals of the East by the West which generally exhibit cultural bias and/or ignorance) typically represents Eastern cultures as inscrutable and mysterious. The West is offered as a bastion of logic, empiricism and science, whilst Eastern cultures are deemed esoteric, mystical and superstitious. In "Seven Years in Tibet", however, Harrer and the Dalai Lama take turns inhabiting the roles of "student" and "teacher". Elsewhere they ridicule each other's fussy customs and traditions, whilst also displaying a shared interest in science, geography and engineering. This is perhaps not surprising. With no holy writs, no deities, and with its interests in scientific enquiry, Buddhism's always been one of the more science-friendly "religions".
Annaud's film climaxes with the Chinese army marching into Tibet and massacring Tibetan soldiers. In reality, this battle did not occur. Before his film closes, Annaud also informs us that over a million Tibetans died at the hands of "evil Chinese communists", a cooked number which most serious academics reject. Scenes like this make "Seven Years in Tibet" a covertly political film, the Dalai Llama presented as a saintly figure unjustly torn from his people and so deserving of political reinstatement.
That the Dalai Lama leads only one branch of Tibetan Buddhists, and that the only people calling for his "return" are the unelected Tibetan royals who exploited Tibetans via a repressive military-ruled feudal state, are messy realities ignored by Annaud. That the Lamas speak for themselves and not the Tibetan people (just as every group of privileged exiles has turned to the United States to help them return to power, the Dalai Lama received CIA funding for a number of years), that half of Tibet's population were serfs or slaves before the Chinese arrived (the rest were under the autocratic rule of the Tibetan aristocracy), and that Tibetan peasants sided with Communists and aggressively attacked Tibetan-theocratic institutions, is likewise ignored. Indeed, Tibetan peasants were some of the most radicalised Communists in China precisely because they suffered heavily under their previous rulers. This is not to defend the actions of China – certainly the Lamas were capable of reforming Tibet themselves, certainly every populace deserves to be autonomous if it so wishes, certainly China's migration policies affect how Tibetans now vote on issues of independence – but to highlight the fact that Annaud has presented a sanitised portrait of the region.
Most big films "about" Buddhism avoid the "tenets" of Buddhism. In "Seven Years in Tibet", Harrer and the Dalai Lama share a number of cute scenes, but philosophy largely remains off-topic. A better director would fully exploit the possibilities that this material lends – why does a character like the Dalai Llama, who renounces the ego, selfhood and private property care about quaint systems of land ownership and leadership? Didn't exile make the Dalai Llama a wiser man? etc – but again Annaud only cares about the superficial. The film costars Jamyang Wangchuk and David Thewlis.
7.5/10 – See "The Last Emperor", "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring" and "Into Great Silence".