Big bore. Reincarnation is notoriously unfilmable as a "straight" subject, though it can sometimes be smuggled through under cover of fantasy. Dead Again was no more than laughable, but Audrey Rose was legitimate fun, and Exorcist II was great, glorious, delirious fun and a lot else besides. Fun, however, is the farthest thing from Bernardo Bertolucci's mind, and the solemn demeanor of his Little Buddha, enveloped in pomp and pageantry and piety, is not apt to win any converts. Nor, in the key phrase for a work of the imagination, to suspend any disbelief. The quest of exiled Tibetan monks to track down the new housing of their deceased teacher, Lama Dorje, gets off to a decent start: the cut from the ancient-world sanctuary of Bhutan to the freeways and skyscrapers of Seattle is in the same direction, if not quite of the same distance, as the one from the bone to the spaceship in 2001. But this effect loses potency through repetition, as Bertolucci shuttles back and forth, on a sort of commuter-train schedule, from the present-day quest to a didactic re-enactment of the spiritual transmutation of Prince Siddhartha into Lord Buddha. (Keanu Reeves, at first almost unrecognizable in his eyeliner, pencilled brows, etc., comes to look more and more like himself as he draws nearer and nearer to enlightenment -- as glaring a case of thespian hubris as ever was.) The overall atmosphere feels suspiciously like that of a classroom, and a very quiet, orderly, autocratic classroom at that. With Chris Isaak, Bridget Fonda, Alex Wiesendanger. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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