Once again a passion. Like The Last Temptation of Christ, Raging Bull, Mean Streets and, in their visionary and sobbing way, Scorsese's "mafia" sagas, Kundun, too, a journey from childhood to exiled youth of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama (in Tibetan, Kundun), has the austere and doubtful pace of a predestination, of a maturation, of a moral choice. Not shouted and punctuated by fury, but controlled by a majestic and continuous harmony, it is no less visionary for this: the last part of the escape towards India (introduced by the bravura piece of the dolly that rises framing Kundun in the center of a stretch of dead monks) slips with priceless timing between reality and dream, reproducing the nervous excitement of both, with high notes that recall the massacre of Taxi Driver and the showdown of Casino. It is as if with this film Scorsese had dried his torments, to pursue pure stylization (…). The incessant questions that tore apart his barbaric and human Christ are the same as Kundun (…), but brought back within a construction that finds its completion in "form". Not a weaving of appearances (like the one that crushes the protagonists of The Age of Innocence), but form as an expression of spirituality, control, transcendence. The figure of the mandala that opens, runs through and closes the film is the most sumptuous and evanescent symbol of this formalized spirit. And the adjustment of perspective that punctuates the film (first it is at the height of a child's eyes, then it balances, to become unbalanced again with the collapse of Kundun's world) is the strongest sign of the protagonist's journey. Moving and intense without doll-likeness, Kundun is a film that tries to convey the soul through the eyes.
