Paths of the Soul (2015, Dir. Zhang Yang):
“It’s true, I have no religious beliefs. However, the shooting, as well as the movie, was a process of rediscovering myself and hopefully for the audience, too. This doesn’t mean that after watching the movie, you will immediately have a faith, because faith is not that simple. But by watching it, I hope you can understand yourself better and by observing their way of life and behavior – very quietly and peacefully you get a reflection of yourself.”
— Zhang Yang
Director Zhang Yang usually operates in two modes — piquant modern comedy (Spicy Love Soup (1997), Driverless (2010)) and observational, gentle drama (Shower (1999), Quitting (2001), and Getting Home (2007)) — but regardless of genre, his concerns have always remained the same. What to make of our strange little existences, and how to draw meaning from the tumult around us? For his latest and most challenging project yet, Zhang has gone more ascetic than ever. Chronicling the pilgrimage of Buddhists from their southeast Tibetan mountain town of Mangkang to Lhasa, Paths of the Soul is essentially a road trip movie, and like all road trip movies aspire to be, it’s a transformative experience.
Zhang has always had a thing for the dispossessed (or at least, the unprepossessing), and you’ll rarely find folks of more humble means than you’ll see here. The story is simplicity itself: a dozen residents of all ages from the same village decides to make the arduous religious journey to Lhasa and nearby holy Mt. Kang. Even under normal conditions, this would be a tough journey, but as Buddhism dictates, the pilgrims must walk the entire length of the trip, all the while performing kowtows — clapping their hands together three times, dropping prostrate and touching their heads to pavement, repeat over and over. Holding wooden clappers on their hands, their bodies protected only by leather aprons, their shoes becoming more tattered by the day, the farmers persist through all types of weather and obstacles, in a journey that takes close to a year and covers almost 800 miles. It’s as simple — and elemental — as a parable.
Shot in documentary style with real-life pilgrims, Zhang hangs back for the most part, letting the starkly beautiful scenery and his characters’ silent determination do the talking. The villagers in the film are mainly types: the elderly uncle and his devoted nephew, the young farmer and his very pregnant wife, the town drunk who wants to cleanse himself for the incident in which he accidentally ran over two workers, the six-year old girl who’s still young enough to think of the trip as a grand adventure. Their rhythms soon become our own: the clapping of hands, the scraping of bodies on asphalt, the prayers over supper that flow out like a gentle stream. Like any good road trip movie, there are pauses for rest, reflection and happy meetings — an old farmer who has plenty of advice on how to kowtow properly, a bunch of construction workers putting up a new house. When challenges arrive, there are no short cuts. The pregnant wife goes into labor, and the entire expedition must be put on hold so they can rush her to the nearest town for the birth. Later, when the tractor towing all of the pilgrim’s supplies breaks down, the men must haul the cart for another 60 miles — and retrace their steps after they’ve finished, clapping and scraping and kowtowing all the way. Through it all, the actors are unaffected, taciturn, resilient, their faces as bedrock as the scenery. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, and even then it’s restricted to simple declarations and explanations of what’s going on. What matters the most is the sight of the villagers pushing their supply cart up a steep incline in a truly Sisyphean task, a restful newborn baby propped on the back, or a wide shot of the cart moving like a bug across the landscape, slow but sure.
Seasons pass in Paths of the Soul, and the story mirrors the gentle passing of time: There is both life and death on this trip, and the conclusion of the movie suggests a cycle ended, a new one begun. If one were to quibble, one could say that the narrative is a bit too neat in its progress, with requisite obstacles thrown in our pilgrims’ way at appropriate intervals, like every good story. Still, Zhang’s refusal to overplay any of his dramatic beats is a perfect match for this material, and the meditative calm in which his characters tackle their task exerts a hypnotic spell for the movie’s duration. If nothing else, Zhang must be credited for creating a film that somehow survived China’s censors despite its unabashed focus on ethnic Tibetan culture. Like the real-life pilgrims working their way across Tibet’s lonely highways, Paths of the Soul doesn’t take any short cuts, which only makes the destination all the more satisfying.
