Montana, Tierra del Fuego, Bhutan
Three films of mountains, inner struggles, and solitary animals
“Cloud Song, Frozen Ink,” by Alanna S. Graboyes (asgraboyesart.com). Based on a medieval Chinese poem in which a monk, alone in the mountains, struggles to write with ink that has frozen.
This week, my wife and I stumbled onto three small, radically differing films. I told her that the common thread was spectacular mountain scenery—Montana, Tierra del Fuego, and Bhutan. She said the other common thread is ordinary people struggling against inner, self-imposed burdens. It occurs to me now that a third commonality is the presence of an lone animal who helps drive the plot along.
Montana Story (2021) concerns two young, long-estranged half-siblings returning to the ranch to deal with their dying, comatose father. In doing so, they cannot avoid revisiting the family demons that provoked their schism seven years earlier. The locale is Paradise Valley in winter, and the animal is a horse nearing the end of its life.
The Tale of King Crab / Re Granchio (2021) tells of a doctor’s son, struggling with alcoholism, in love with the daughter of a local farmer, in a small village in late-19th century Italy. He commits an act of vandalism that yields tragic consequences,and is forced into exile in the wilds of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego. Struggling with his failings, he undertakes a mystical quest for redemption, accompanied by a king crab that may have mystical powers, and which the protagonist carries through the mountains in a bucket over several years. I was reminded at times of the quests in The Mission, Fitzcaraldo, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The film mentions some locale called Aguirre, and I’m guessing that was a subtle homage.
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom / ལུང་ནག་ན (2019) follows a young Bhutanese man who dreams of a singing career in Australia but ends up spending months as a teacher in Lunana—arguably the remotest town on earth. Dissatisfied with his country’s provincialism, he is forced by national service requirements to spend the better part of a year among the villagers — disconnected from his beloved electronics. As the title reveals, he contends with a yak living in his classroom. In the hands of Hollywood, the film would have been Brigadoon, with a cheerful ending. Lunana, though, is far more subtle and worldly.
Do the characters find the peace and redemption they seek? In at least two, the answer is shrouded in ambiguity. Regardless of what one thinks of the plots, the Rockies, the Fuegian Andes, and the Himalayas are spectacular. And one feels powerful emotions for for the horse, the crab, and yak.
As an economist, I must note that the plot of Lunana is driven by the Bhutanese government’s pursuit of “Gross National Happiness (GNH)”—an idiosyncratic measure of national economic output that Bhutan insists is a better metric than Gross Domestic Product (GDP). I’m not convinced that GNH is better than GDP, but in this film, GNH makes for good conversation and some really breathtaking cinematography.