Film Review: Travelers and Magicians (2003)

On Wednesday at 18:31 the Phnom Penh Film Club will savor the delightful and elegiac 2003 love-letter to the Kingdom of Bhutan, Khyentse Norbu’s *Travelers and Magicians*. 

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One of the many things we lost when brick and mortar movie-rental stores went away, was their facility to serve as a de facto editorial vetting for the international film scene. In 2003, if you strolled into a Blockbuster- or Hollywood Video, and saw a “foreign” film available for rent, you couldn’t necessarily guarantee that it would be delightful (or even entertaining), but you could pretty-much guarantee that it would be significant in *some* way: Some international films would be importantly representative of the state of play in their home countries; some would be statement-pieces by a breakthrough director. Some would be terrific movies. 

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And then, every once in a while, a film in this section of the store would turn out to be all of these things at once, like this one. 

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Travelers and Magicians tells the twin tales of “Dondup”—a modern-day government official who dislikes his posting and dreams of emigrating to the United States—and “Tashi,” a restless farmboy who dislikes his magic classes so intensely that he flees into the woods, only to find himself drawn into an unsavory plot being orchestrated by a young woman in a joyless May-December marriage. 

Dondup, it transpires, has come into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apply for a U.S. visa but, in just the first of a long series of complications, he misses the only bus to the capital city of Thimphu and is forced to hitchhike with a Buddhist monk, who spins him the parallel story of Tashi as a way to pass the time. As Dondup’s misadventures multiply, he and the monk are joined by an aging widower and his daughter, hoping to reach Thimphu in time to sell their home-made rice paper at an upcoming religious festival. 

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Now a foursome, the party moves unhurriedly through the breathtaking Bhutanese countryside while the monk’s tale of Tashi and his unwilling enlistment in a sordid triangle of intrigue careens closer and closer to a moment of gripping tragedy. Will Dondup reach the capital in time to make his interview? Will Tashi’s story find its dénouement before the group must disband to its assorted fates? Has fortune already smiled on Dondup out there on that soaring yet companionable road, albeit in a fortune for which he hadn’t planned? 

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In post-release interviews, writer-director Khyentse Norbu revealed that the Dondup story is an adaptation of a Japanese legend, while the Tashi story is a much more loyal adaptation of a traditional Bhutanese Buddhist folk tale. The seamless nesting of the stories is considered an essential aspect of Bhutanese storytelling, and none of the cast were professional actors. Indeed very few of them possessed the appropriate spoken language for their parts, and required extensive dialogue coaching before they could reliably recite their lines. 

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I hope everyone will plan on joining us on Wednesday for this imminently delightful and breathtakingly gorgeous little gem of a movie. I can guarantee you a terrific night in the company of some of the best storytellers in Bhutan. All three of them.