Word: siddhartha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Steppenwolf, the Hesse novel that all my friends and I loved but didn't understand in high school, has been made into a movie just so I won't understand it in college. The last Hesse story that got a film treatment, Siddhartha, turned out horrendously, but the new film has the potential to be at least interesting. The cast for this one is quite good: Max von Sydow and Dominique Sandra star. The Orson Welles is having a one-time-only "sneak" preview tonight, so if you're interested be forewarned...
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...
...exactly sure just what audience Siddhartha was trying to reach. Hesse's work was a big book on the campuses in the mid-sixties, but unless you have been taking acid every day for the last five years, suffer from terminal brain disease, and have felt an uncontrollable inclination lately to find out what "Millenium '73" is all about, Siddhartha is not likely to do much for your level of consciousness...