Word: siddhartha
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...empty profundity of the script is appropriately paralleled by the craft of the director. When Siddhartha is going through his dionysian period, we are treated to a wealth of prison images--birdcages, open temples with arabesque walls, etc. Doors are continually opening on the screen for no apparent reason other than to show us that transition is going on in Siddhartha's spiritual development. The director gives us a succession of gratuitous images which are supposed to be pregnant with meaning, but what we see is only a collection of boring objects...
THIS KIND of thing gets tiresome as soon as the film begins, but gradually the philosophical gruel becomes downright insidious. If one actually were to try to excavate one idea from Siddhartha, it might be that "everything changes," (they also say that "everything returns" in the same breath--the logic isn't clear) "like the river"--a direct steal from Heraclitus's idea that one never steps into the same river twice. At any rate the logic of the film reveals that one should not fight time, or chase wealth, but live in the present and for the moment. There...
This is all fine, especially for Siddhartha, who has no possessions, magically lives off the forest, and is automatically taken into the bosom of every household and every bed he approaches in his travels without so much as an introduction. But when the implication is that "this is all ye know and need to know"--the ultimate panacea--one wonders about the starving Indian peasants who this film loves to display dancing and smoking dope: They're in rags, but they're spiritually free...
...would like to say that Siddhartha is beautiful to look at. It was filmed in Northern India, and clearly the film-makers were trying very hard for breathtaking landscapes--they blur flowers, set suns galore, swoop in on reflecting bodies of water. But their idea of painting a humid. ethereal environment is fuzzy backgrounds, mist, and drippy trees. When they try to make a visual delight out of five straight minutes of someone being cremated (the embers glowing in the night), the effect is aesthetically negligible...
...original material for Siddhartha--the book itself--was no gem, but the basic setting and action has potential. Louis Malle (Phantom India) and Jean Renoir (The River), along with Satyajit Ray and his Apu trilogy, have shown that India's culture is fascinating on film. And Kon Ichikawa made a brilliant Japanese film called The Burmese Harp about a soldier burying the unknown dead after the World War II defeat, giving the story of a religious ascetic roaming the countryside incredible resonance and conviction...