Review of Travellers and Magicians / ཆང་ཧུབ་ཐེངས་གཅིག་གི་འཁྲུལ་སྣང , directed by Khyentse Norbu

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

I elevated this game by acquiring a Criterion subscription a few months back. Before getting my job I was a lot more tight with my money, and although I could technically afford the Criterion subscription, I put it into investments instead. But now I’m investing in my brain more along with my longterm retirement, which is a great feeling.

I love watching movies from countries I want to visit, so today I specifically picked out Travellers and Magicians, which is from Bhutan. I was planning a trip to Bhutan when I won a Fulbright to India, but the Fulbright didn’t work out and it never happened. Maybe in the future! In the meantime, I’m fine with watching movies.

Let’s get into the review.

A man disillusioned with his hometown and tries to leave for the United States, but learns some lessons along the way.

Our main character in this movie is Dondup, who lives in rural Bhutan but finds his head dreaming of living somewhere else. He specifically dreams of going to the United States and living his best life abroad, as far away from Bhutan as he can get, and this movie is really about him trying to make that happen initially.

Despite having a comfortable government job in Bhutan, he initiates his plan of going to the States. He makes a plan to go to the US embassy to try and get a visa to enter the nation, but he misses the first bus to the capital of the country. Determined, he decides to hitchhike his way there.

He finds himself walking along a road for a long time, and befriends some local people who are also heading in the same direction. There’s a an apple seller with his wares, a Buddhist monk, and a paper maker and his daughter Sonam on the road with Dondup.

That’s when the monk launches into story time, which is a good chunk of the rest of the movie. He tells the story specifically of a boy named Tashi who dreams of leaving behind Bhutan’s villages for greener pastures. Tashi takes his horse and ventures into the forest to start that dream, but then gets lost.

The mountains he’s in are quite remote and scarce of people, so when he runs into a woodcutter and his wife Tashi is overjoyed. Considering he only wanted to leave his village behind, he finds the setup of living with these two to be great, but then he ends up falling for the wife.

He’s very much afraid of the woodcutter, who’s proficient with an axe, forcing the two to continue their escapades in secret. When the wife falls pregnant with Tashi’s baby, they enact a plan to kill the woodcutter and live out the rest of their lives. Tashi does try to kill him, but then runs away when the man is dying.

The pregnant wife chases after Tashi, but then falls into a river and drowns, killing the baby along with her. We then learn this is a cautionary tale: it’s a series of hallucinations that were spurred by the hitchhiking group drinking a homemade Bhutanese liquor.

Turns out the monk noticed that Dondup is into the papermaker’s daughter, Sonam, and is telling a story to tell him. Dondup ends up getting a ride to the capital after that, but we don’t know what happens to him, as the movie ends right there.

Overall Thoughts

Like the tale told within it, this is very much a movie that is cautioning the viewer about the notion of “be careful what you wish for.” In Dondup’s case, he was very much fixated on a life beyond the one he was living, even though he was pretty comfortable, and that led to consequences that we, as the viewers, begin to doubt by the end of the movie.

That said, I think that this is a movie that does have a bit of hope beyond that. Maybe he did go off and achieve his dream of going to the United States, and the monk is someone who is small minded and just a cautious figure in his journey.

I enjoyed watching this film overall though! Bhutanese film is always something that I find to be fascinating, especially because it’s such a new national cinema emerging out of the region. Bhutan is somewhere that sticks to its traditional ways, rightfully so, and we can see through the the medium of film.

Go watch this one if you have the chance! Experience it for yourself.

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