Jinpa (Pema Tseden, 2018) (Patreon)

A moderately upbeat, even Jarmuschian fable from Tibet's leading auteur, Jinpa takes its name from its lead actor, who also starred in Tseden's previous film Tharlo. Here, Jinpa plays a man with the same name as his own, although he is clearly not playing himself. This "Jinpa" is a long-distance trucker who traverses the dusty, snowy flats of Kekexili making deliveries. He has tousled rock-star hair, always wears shades, and the cab of his beat-up lorry looks like a college dorm room, hung with tapestries and taped up with photos. (In fact, it has a similar look to the cab of the truck in Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, so maybe this is just a Central Asian "thing.")

The key to Jinpa is that there are a select few incidents that only add up to a narrative by implication or metaphorical relationship. In and of themselves, they are quite separate and anecdotal, providing a sense of happenstance that could, I suppose, have something to do with the Buddhism that serves as the backdrop for all of the otherwise random goings-on. In the first few minutes, for example, Jinpa accidentally runs over a sheep. This otherwise cool customer is distraught, and he loads the animal's body up in his truck and takes it to a temple along the way, asking the monks there for assistance in making sure the sheep's soul will transition properly into the next life.

It's shortly after this that Jinpa picks up a hitchhiker (Genden Phuntsok) who he believes to be a beggar. But the man has some money, and is heading to the next town with a purpose. Jinpa is shocked to learn that the traveler's name is also Jinpa, and this disheveled man believes that after ten long years, he has finally tracked down the man who killed his father. He is going into town to dispatch him. 

The second half of Jinpa takes place after the driver has dropped off the beggar, reached the town, and is inquiring as to the fate of the man he may have had an indirect hand in killing. Tseden uses a kind of warped, fish-eye effect, a sort of visual flange, to represent the flashbacks, providing an experimental impact that one seldom sees in narrative film. (It's worth noting that Jinpa was produced by Wong Kar-wai's Jet Tone Films shingle, and production designer William Chang worked on the film.) But even in the "normal" portions of Jinpa, Tseden creates a slightly bleached, color-corroded effect that turns the Tibetan landscape into a kind of radiant field.

Above I compared Jinpa to the work of Jim Jarmusch, and this is partly because of its episodic nature. But it's also because this is a film that can be mistaken as a "hipster" effort by the viewer who isn't looking at it too closely. In fact, it's the story of a man who lives at a slight remove from those around him -- consider his offbeat love of opera -- whose distanciation from his fellow humans breaks down quite unexpectedly. We know that Jinpa the driver has emotional investments. A picture of his daughter hangs from his rearview mirror. But that's something he keeps strictly within the inner sanctum of his truck, and when he lets Jinpa the beggar in, his steely reserve begins to break down. In the final shot, the driver removes his ever-present shades, as if to let the radiance of the world around him pierce his very being.