So, it’s a love story I’ve decided. It took me a while to come to this conclusion, but no, it’s most definitely a love story. The Tibetan film The Search (directed by Pema Tseden) attempts to give its viewers a holistic and culturally realistic view of what it means to find love in the strangest, most diverse, and barest circumstances imaginable.
The film follows a crew of filmmakers who travel around modern day Tibet by car in hopes of finding an actor to sing in a film version of a famous Tibetan Opera. Early in the film, the crew finds their lead female actress, a young, attractive girl, whose face is constantly masked by a pink veil. She agrees to travel with the crew so long as they provide her the opportunity to settle differences with her ex-boyfriend who lives on the other side of the country. The rest of the film is an account of the crew’s journey across Tibet in the attempt to find the ex and the many interesting people they audition along the way, including a drunk, long haired man at a karaoke bar, and a Tibetan Charlie Chaplin.
One of the stronger points of the film was certainly the scenery. The film gave a great account of what the Tibetan countryside is really like. And it’s not always pretty. The viewer experiences everything from stony mountain villages with small stony huts, to bare rolling hills thick with grain. I feel the realism of the countryside could be attributed to the cinematography, which in my opinion was intelligent and well crafted, but not necessarily mind blowing. To be more specific, there were a lot of static shots of landscapes and villages, emphasizing ambience over action. Many of shots had strong interior framing, directing the viewer’s eye towards certain details of the landscape that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
On the other hand, and I gotta be honest here, the content of the storyline, including dialogue and action, moved extremely slowly, making the film feel as if it was constantly dragging. I understood and praised Tseden’s intention of capturing real-time action, filming almost in documentary fashion, but it failed to keep my interest after the first half hour. Furthermore, the underlying themes of the film, (mainly that of love) were certainly present, but played so subtly that it made the film appear empty and meaningless at certain points.
I must admit I left the film feeling dissatisfied, not knowing what to examine, or what to feel, and only after an hour of occupying my mind with other activities, could I return to my experience and scrape something to take away. I feel I should be mentioned however, that The Search was the first to be shot with an entirely Tibetan crew and in the Tibetan language, and for this reason, it deserves recognition.