** LITTLE BUDDHA
With Keanu Reeves, Chris Isaak, Bridget Fonda, Alex Wiesendanger, Ying Ruocheng, Jigme Kunsang, Raju Ial, and Greishma Makar Singh.
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Bertolucci has been grappling with contradictions of this sort ever since the 1977 1900, when he tried to sell communism to the masses with Hollywood-ish, Gone With the Wind trappings. Before that he’d deliberately turned away from the art cinema that nourished his best early features, the still exciting Before the Revolution (1964) and The Spider’s Strategem (1970), to direct the highly profitable, highly influential retro fashion show The Conformist (1970) and the psychosexual melodrama Last Tango in Paris (1972). Ever since his neglected but interesting Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), he’s steered clear of contemporary Italy. And the spiritual quest, expressed in terms of exotic spectacle, that has dominated his work since The Last Emperor has been progressively stripped of the social and sexual preoccupations that initially gave this search some continuity with his early art-cinema features; the social concerns were pared away in The Sheltering Sky, and the sexual concerns are nowhere in evidence in Little Buddha.
Once Lama Norbu, Champa, Dean, and Jesse are in Kathmandu they meet Raju (Raju Ial), the Nepalese boy who is the other candidate, and learn about a third candidate. This is a girl named Gita (Greishma Makar Singh) who lives in the Terai lowlands of Nepal, beside the garden and tree where Siddhartha achieved the illumination that led to the founding of Buddhism. When they all travel to this spot, the two stories magically merge, and the three children and Siddhartha appear in the same shots, beside the same tree in the same garden. It’s a beautiful sequence–the best thing in the movie–and when Bertolucci has to follow it up with an elaborate resolution of the contemporary story, in Bhutan and Seattle, the effect is both strained and anticlimactic.
