The yak caravan returns to a remote Himalayan community, bearing bad news along with vital supplies: Chief Tinle's son died while attempting a dangerous short-cut. His's friend, Karma, warned him against the route and tried to save him, but to no avail.
Tinle, however, suspects that Karma has caused his son's death, recalling a generations-old feud between the two families.
The seasons pass and time comes for the next caravan to depart. Tinle, however, is unwilling to let Karma lead it, though everyone knows that he is the most capable.
Karma, meanwhile, is reluctant to follow the Lama's divinations and wants to leave ahead of the appointed time.
While Tinle recruits his other son, Norbu, a monastic lama with no experience of a yak herder's life, to lead his caravan, Karma leaves with the majority of the community in tow.
Tinle and his party then set off. Tailing behind Karma's party and losing ground with each passing day, Tinle elects to take the treacherous short-cut that caused his son's death…
One of Himalaya 's many assets is the believability of its characters. They are rounded, with strengths and weaknesses in equal measure. Through Tinle, Karma and the other members of the community the film-makers deal with numerous complex themes – tradition and modernity; faith and reason; value and instrumental rationality; and traditional, charismatic and rational-legal authority. And they do so without recourse to simple ciphers or crudely drawn binary oppositions.
Tinle and Karma are more alike than they are different; a fact both men ultimately come to acknowledge. As Tinle says, the chief – or the one who wishes to become one – must disobey.
One suspects that in the Hollywood version we would have seen Karma either make a desperate attempt to save Tinle's son or betray and murder him. Ambiguity and nuance would have been lost and there would have been clear cut villains and heroes.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to portray the film as an oppositional, anti-Hollywood piece. The basic plot could easily come from a Western – Red River , if we wanted to be specific – and the scoring, though certainly evocative and memorable, could well be accused of inauthenticity; world music in place of "the real thing". (Though it's certainly no worse than, say, Peter Gabriel's contributions to Rabbit Proof Fence et al or Enya's cod-Celtic work on The Lord of the Rings .)
Whatever minor quibbles one may have, Eric Valli's direction is as sure footed as a yak and the performances are impeccable. Himalaya is a remarkable film which joins that select handful of titles – The Shawshank Redemption and The Three Colours trilogy being perhaps the only other examples in recent years – that no one could dislike. If "to know it is to love it" is a touch too strong, it's not far off.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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