What is wrong with Seattle, where statistics say the highest quality of life is found? The Conrads are, like the Moresbys in The Sheltering Sky, well-off, well-built and educated, and they also have a nice and curious son. Bertolucci and Storaro replicate here the chromatic dualism they had designed for Last Tango and other works: the Apollonian conformism is tinged with blue, the Dionysian box has orange walls. These two colors and their emotional meaning characterize the set of Little Buddha. Therefore, Seattle is cold and aseptic like the interior of a morgue, while northern India is a triumph of paintings, bright decorations, warm microbial impastos. This means that the Western Conrads seem happy but are not, just as the miserable Indians, apparently crushed by misfortune, show an enviable inner serenity. So far everything is very obvious and predictable but the director knows that things are not so simple, because even the East has its troubles and is trying to find a way out of them. So repeating the fairy tale story of Prince Siddharta Gautama (ca. 565-486 BC), called the Buddha, can be useful to both. Using the usual technique of flashback, Bertolucci unfolds before our enchanted eyes the very long piece of precious linen that is the formidable epic of the Awakened. In fact, everything begins with the “once upon a time” emblematic of the fable of the holy man and the goat, where the latter reveals to the former, ready to slaughter her, that in a previous life she was a holy man who sacrificed goats to the gods. It is in the name of compassion and a happy medium that the prince becomes poor and, leaving his father’s house, begins his journey into the world. It is almost useless to add that for the director, Siddharta is comparable to Oedipus, to Sigismund, to Athos junior from The Spider’s Stratagem or to the last emperor of China. So what is more real to believe, the colorful Buddhist makeup, the legendary hero Siddharta or the funereal western shores? Bertolucci seems to still think that cinema is life, as the directors of the nouvelle vague believed: it follows that cinema is a dream, indeed it aspires to assume in Little Buddha the status of supreme luxury, religion.
