Sooner or later, everyone in THE MONK AND THE GUN asks the obvious question. What would a monk want with a gun? The monk in this case is a Bhutanese Buddhist Lama, and he is about to break his meditation retreat two years early in order to perform a ritual that will need one. Actually, two. The reason, not revealed until this Bhutanese film’s profound, poetic, and yet lighthearted denouement, has to do with that Himalayan country’s leap into the modern world with the introduction of the internet, television, and, with the abdication of the people’s beloved king in 2006, democracy.
The Lama’s acolyte, Tashi (Tandin Wangchuk) has never seen a gun, at least not in person, and is not sure if one can even be found in Bhutan, but he cheerfully sets out into the surrounding countryside on his holy quest. Along the way, he encounters the least successful of the Daniel Craig 007 films, a gun enthusiast (Harry Einhorn) from the United States traveling under the puckish moniker of Ronald Coleman, and an official newly arrived from the Bhutan’s capitol tasked with helping to teach the locals how to vote by staging a mock election.
This comedy of manners gently satirizes the difficulties and downsides of bringing in foreign influences to a country that calculates a Gross National Happiness index. The shady fixer who can bring in the AK47s so admired by Tashi in the Bond films, to the friction inherent in a system that requires citizens to take sides in an election. As one village elder puts it to the government official tasked with bringing them into enfranchisement, why do you want us to be so rude to one another? The rudeness is brought home, literally, in one formerly harmonious family, when the father backs a different candidate from his mother-in-law (and the rest of the village), with the fallout landing squarely on his wife and daughter, who bear the brunt of the ostracism.
That Bhutan is working from a different paradigm is played for laughs by tweaking the worldview in such a way that the western mindset seems absurd, starting with when the American is told by his guide/translator, Benji (Tandin Sonam), that the current owner of the rifle Mr. Ron has traveled so far to buy won’t sell for the amount offered because it is too high. The current owner’s sense of honesty, and his karma, won’t allow it, a concept that is literally lost in translation.
Karma may have its place in this tale, but it’s kismet that drives the narrative. Coincidences sneakily accumulate such that the power of an ancient Lama’s intentions has the coercive power to accomplish what an executive order can’t hope to approximate. The principle of democracy, that people have fought for the right to vote, is respected while the issues involved in translating the concept of that form of government to an essentially content people present their own unique, and uniquely piquant problems.
Filmed to take full advantage of the sweeping vistas and buttery light that add to the sense of timelessness in this aethereally beautiful country, THE MONK AND THE GUN is like a zen koan for beginners. Puzzling, surprising, and delightfully incongruous, it encourages us to see things with new eyes, open hearts, and good humor.
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