Samsara (Lois Patiño, 2023) (Patreon)

Although I've always found Armond White's "Better Than" list to be needlessly petulant, I do occasionally understand the impulse. While I certainly admire Eduardo Williams' The Human Surge 3 (review coming forthwith), I have the sense that its formalist showboating allowed a lot of critics and programmers to overlook the fact that contentwise, it's fairly pedestrian. (We live in a complex, interconnected world....) By contrast, Samsara, the latest and best feature by Spain's Lois Patiño, hasn't gotten a whole lot of festival play since its debut at the Berlinale, where it was quite well received. This film seems like an obvious selection for those festival slots earmarked for feature films with an experimental streak, but it hasn't really played out that way.

To its credit, The Human Surge 3 avoids trying to make bold statements about its globetrotting approach to narrative. Instead Williams adopts a more poetic approach, with a number of concepts hovering around one another as frequent refrains. By contrast, Samsara is very much "about something," and while this is not in and of itself a point in Patiño's favor, it does speak to the filmmaker's refusal to allow a narrow identity politics to set his agenda. This is a film that is very frank about its desire to explore cultures that are not Patiño's own -- specifically Laotian Buddhism and the seaweed harvesters of coastal Tanzania. But Samsara is hardly a touristic film. Instead, Patiño takes his cues from filmmakers such as Peter Hutton and especially Mark LaPore, charting not only the people and places before him but also his fundamental distance from those environments.

Samsara is a film in two parts, connected by an entr'acte. The first half is set in Laos, where we follow the suggestively named Amid (Amid Keomany), a young man who is not a member of the local monastery but seems to just enjoy hanging out with monks. The saffron of their robes is the dominant color in this segment, and Patiño frequently sets it off against the jungle landscape and somewhat turbulent bodies of water. Amid has also volunteered to help an elderly woman, Mor (Toumor Xiong), prepare to die, by reading to her from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In these segments, Amid explains to Mor what she will encounter when she is separated from her body, temporarily stranded in her world as a ghost. Before experiencing her reincarnation, she must pass through the Samsara, a kind of phenomenological limbo, where she will be transformed.

In this first segment, Patiño manipulates the image whenever someone is asleep, and again when Mor eventually passes away. He uses stark color filters and superimposed B-roll imagery, often to suggest that the natural world moves all on its own regardless of the physical presence of human beings. In his most frequent intervention, Patiño layers in transparent, upward-moving scrolls that depict Buddhist precepts, artworks that resemble jeweled mosaics. 

After Mon has died, Patiño places a text onscreen that explains that the film will follow her into the Samsara. However, in order to make this journey, we must close our eyes. For about ten minutes, Samsara mostly goes dark, but this darkness is frequently pierced by brightly colored flashes and flickers. Patiño is borrowing the specialized cinematic language of folks like Peter Kubelka, Tony Conrad, and especially Paul Sharits. These pulses of color are quite beautiful, and make the most of Patiño's employment of Kodak film stock. At the same time, Samsara makes accurate use of these avant-garde techniques in a semi-narrative context. These light jabs can in fact penetrate the closed eyelid, and so Patiño is harnessing a kind of expanded-cinema energy for the purpose of spiritual examination. Like Sharits, Patiño uses cinematic light to at least gesture toward a higher state of consciousness.

In the second half of Samsara, we are transported to the beaches of Zanzibar, where a little girl (Juwairiya Idrisa Uwesu) witnesses the birth of a baby goat. This goat, we are to understand, is the receptacle for Mor's spirit, and the goat kid becomes Juwairiya's constant companion. In the course of this section, we learn that Juwairiya's mother (Mariam Vuaa Mtego) is a seaweed harvester, and is planning to purchase a pressing machine that will allow her and her women coworkers to dry and process the seaweed themselves. (It is made into a soap that is popular with tourists.) This section has a gently didactic aspect, since we closely observe the seaweed harvest, listening to the women talk about their low wages; see Juwairiya go to school; and meet a member of the Maasai tribe who talks about their traditions regarding the dead. By the end, Juwairiya's goat has gone astray, and we hear her express her wish that she will be okay until they are reunited.

I am not sure whether this has anything to do with Samsara's relative absence from North American festivals, but various commentators have mentioned that the film's first part is very derivative of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The combination of ordinary activity and the monastic life, together with the overt concern with the journey into the hereafter, recalls certain aspects of Tropical Malady, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and Cemetery of Splendor. Patiño's occasional tendency to depict action in long shot, and the Laotian landscape, all resemble Apichatpong, although the generous distribution of robed monks throughout the frame is also reminiscent of Tsai Ming-liang. I have not seen much similar discussion of the Zanzibar section, but to me, its use of nonprofessional actors playing themselves and performing a simulacrum of their work and school lives looked a lot like Abderrahmane Sissako. 

In other words, it's possible to see Samsara as Patiño's attempt at global cinema, but one that fails to find its own voice. The radical experimentation is held together by two fairly recognizable art-film languages, the Southeast Asian film and the African film. (It is worth noting that Samsara was partly produced by the Jeonju Cinema Project.) But could this be precisely the point? Samsara is a film about death and rebirth, the endless cycle of life and consciousness. In order to achieve this loose narrativization of the Buddhist belief in circular time, Patiño borrows from three external, preexisting cinematic forms: we could reasonably call them "Apichatpong," "Sharits," and "Sissako." It is a bit of a hoary academic idea that there is nothing new, that there is only postmodern pastiche and upcycling. But Samsara (which also inevitably reminds us of the earlier film by Ron Fricke, which is indeed touristic) employs note-perfect pastiche in order to emphasize the universality of all expression. We don't often remember it, but authorship and the auteur theory rely on a significant presumption: the singularity of the ego. Samsara finds Patiño plunging into self-erasure as a uniquely creative gesture, leaping into the aesthetic void. This probably doesn't jive with a film business that stakes its claim on the Proper Name, the easily identifiable signature style. Instead, I'm reminded of the old joke about the Buddhist and the hot dog vendor. With Samsara, Patiño truly says "make me one with everything."