Ximalaya wang zi

As part of the Adelaide Film Festival "Prince of the Himalayas" was on screening today, with a little speech from the director. It proved to be a very refreshing and interesting ride. Prince of the Himalayas brought a savage and splendid Tibet to life and its gorgeous scenery is the perfect setting for the grand drama it portrays.

The movie stayed very true to the original plot of Hamlet, but the change of setting and a few extra touches made it worth a revisit. Main difference was the bigger emphasis on a battle on the spiritual level, maybe reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhist traditions and notions of karma and rebirth.

The biggest attractions of the movie however are by far the landscape, sets and costumes. The contrast between the stark and often barren landscape and the exquisite costumes made for some awe-inspiring moments. The whole look of the film steered clear from the Tibetan view as we have seen it for a long time: no monks in crimson, purple and golden robes, but a bizarre mix of wolf skins, splendid silks, leather straps, snow leopard hides, wool, and deep colored fabrics and jewelery. Together with the original Tibetan language, the movie became the fabled Shangri-La, but with tragedy at its core.

Sherwood Hu's remarkable Hamlet, Prince of the Himalayas, better even than Kosintsev's Renaissance-court version and at least as good as Throne of Blood, here at last a Hamlet that makes emotional sense of the plot and the back story. Ophelia drowns pregnant, Claudius is Hamlet's biological father and Hamlet Senior was about to kill the adulterous Gertrude when the timely ear-drop regicide saved her, and now, a riled and baleful ghost, he whispers big lies to the dithering prince who dares not slay Claudius for fear of the truth of his genesis. It shows us with force and ardour what, in an ancient, galloping, tribal, horn-hatted society of bellicose chieftains and drawn broadswords, Usurpation and Regicide mean, and Royalty too, by God.

And all this, amazingly, is achieved with a bare five hundred words of Shakespeare's text but many looks, nuances, flashbacks, nightmares, faces in mist, and mountainside Eisenstein compositions that give you, in subtext, the great words back. No better film of the Bard exists I fear, having racked my brains and searched my emptying memory, not Welles's, Olivier's, Polanski's, Kurosawa's, Branagh's, Brooks's, Wright's, Hall's, Reinhardt's, though Kosintsev's Lear is in the league and Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, curiously (Brando, Gielgud, Mason, Garson, Kerr, Pate, the harsh, electrifying Louis Calhern), on a fortieth viewing still in the outer ballpark. This young man Sherwood Hu (whose name sounds like a novel by Charles Kingsley), an American Samoan Chinese based in both Beijing and Frisco, is already as good as the greatest cinema deities -- Eisenstein, Bergman, Bresson, Fellini.