Siddhartha

The movie is an allegory, set 2,500 years ago, about a young man who sets out one day to discover the secrets of life. We follow him until his death many years later, and along the way we see him accumulate wealth and then dispose of it, fall in love and then renounce carnal pleasures, and finally discover that truth lies within himself and can never be taught. At the end we are happy for Siddhartha, but we wonder (in the words of the famous British election cry), what about the workers? And what about us? Thanks for nothing, Siddhartha.

The movie is good to look at: Rooks worked with Sven Nykvist, who at the time was photographing all of the Ingmar Bergman films. The trouble is that the movie’s almost too pretty. We get sunsets and vistas and slow-moving rivers and dust in the sunlight and magnificent Indian settings (man-made and real). And against all of this splendor, the activities of the characters seem somehow unreal and not crucial.