The San Diego Asian Film Festival returned for its 13th spring showcase with one of its most interesting exhibitions—an entire Sunday dedicated to films directed by the late Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden. Four films, from his second feature to his most recent film, were on display at Ultrastar Cinemas in Mission Valley. We caught the second film out of the quadruple feature, his 2015 film “Tharlo.”
“Tharlo” follows the same narrative beats as a Greek tragedy or a modern folktale. An orphaned man with no real name must find his bearings in a society that has largely ostracized and sequestered his kind. Despite appearing a mostly well-spirited individual, he finds himself at the short end of every stick, unable to adapt to his metropolitan surroundings, representing the ideological impasse between rural and urban Tibetan life. Tharlo, the titular main character portrayed by Shide Nyima, acts as a medium, a theoretical bridge between the two worlds. A fact made even more apparent through the various characters he meets throughout the story.
At its core, “Tharlo” is about how far someone is willing to go to escape loneliness, that irreconcilable feeling something is missing from your life. Almost as if, you haven’t lived enough to be considered a full human being.
Tharlo doesn’t speak very much throughout the film, despite it being named after him. His permissive tendencies eventually lead him down a path of despair and uncertainty. It displays not only an ideological difference between the various lifestyles of the Tibetan people shown in the film but also a sociological one. It’s not so much that Tharlo is a victim of naivete, more so a victim of unfair ignorance. He is inherently trustworthy of people due to his lack of exposure to people as a whole. He blindly reciprocates and follows the words of others due to a perceived sense of inequality or authority from most people around him. His strange quirks and idiosyncracies are exploited constantly for personal gain or just plain amusement.
The only time where Tharlo is in any kind of peace is when he is alone on his goat farm, an environment that quickly eludes him after his exposure to alternative lifestyles, almost as if he has been corrupted by it. A powerful scene displays this point very clearly, Tharlo sits upon a rock watching his goats herd themselves into a small clearing. They move farther and farther away from him, whilst the frame slowly converges on his isolated figure.
Most of the deeper themes in “Tharlo” are expressed like this. They’re typically visual and almost purely subtextual. It toes the line of slice-of-life more than melodrama. This is likely because the film doesn’t follow the same constrictions of a traditional narrative film. Its neo-realist style is more akin to a well-staged documentary or even cinéma vérité. The camera often sits in a single spot for a long time, portraying Tharlo’s existence rather indifferently.
However, it would be unfair to say that the film isn’t without a sort of bias built into its skeleton. The film is a tragedy after all, and Tharlo plays the fool throughout most of it. Whether Tseden is alluding to a preference toward one viewpoint over another is probably unimportant either way. We are meant to identify with Tharlo because the film is ultimately about his experience. In a way, he represents tradition as a whole. How most will largely leave it behind to advance as quickly as possible, a sort of forced adaptation to which Tharlo willingly complies.
In a Sampson-esque turn of events, his hair is shaved off, stripping him of his strength and overall sense of self. He’s completely transformed, his previous life, is just a memory. What is left is all he can see through old Tibetan eyes.
Turn off the Bright Lights 