Word: annaud
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...China's brutal, 46-year occupation of Tibet. But just as both open with the soulful moan of Tibetan horns overlapped by the eerie, two-toned chanting of monks, the spiritual underlay of both is Tibet's ornate, pacifistic Buddhist belief. Says Seven Years director Jean-Jacques Annaud of his film: "Buddhism is everywhere." And he is right. Pitt's hair shines with its usual otherworldly luster, yet it is upstaged by the inner glow of his Tibetan co-stars. "I have to stay here," the young Dalai Lama says when offered a chance to escape the Chinese. "Saving others...
...happier he is. The wind's blowing at 90 m.p.h., there's dust in your eyes, bombs going off, and he's shouting in this wild French accent, 'We must shoot. We must shoot now!' He's like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now." Sounds as though Jean-Jacques Annaud is just the fellow to film Harrer's life...
...Annaud's version of the Harrer memoir, Seven Years in Tibet, is true to the compulsions and contradictions in each man. It has exciting, boy's-life-perils footage of men risking their necks (and breaking a leg) for the suicidal glory of getting to the top of something they can only come down from--the high before the depression. It documents the stubborn spirit of a fellow contemptuous of compromise, almost of humanity, and his rebirth in a land where each desolation dissolves in beatific smiles. It is about a solitary star, trussed in celebrity, who learns...
There were battles aplenty, though, to get the thing made. Annaud insisted that the film would not be hostile to China. But the Maoist bureaucrats must have noticed that he had his fingers crossed; they opposed his efforts to film in several nearby Himalayan nations. He set his location sites on India, but the government there dawdled endlessly. "I could see something was terribly wrong," he says. "They kept telling us we'd get permission, yet nothing was happening...
While the audience is eating this up with a spoon, Annaud smoothly slips in political issues concerning China's occupancy of Tibet and the ongoing struggle of the Dalai Lama to maintain Tibet's traditional peaceful position. Both Harrer and we the viewers--who have been in parallel states of emotional responsiveness the whole way through--are at this point immediately receptive and sympathetic to the urgency of the Tibetan cause. In only half a movie, the audience comes to buy a complete shift in a character's personality, a familial reconciliation which was at first daunting and allegiance...