An old man (Lochey) would rather sell himself than his canine companion in Pema Tseden’s Old Dog
OLD DOG (LAO GOU/KHYI RGAN) (Pema Tseden, 2011)
Asia Society
725 Park Ave. at 70th St.
Sunday, January 28, free with advance registration, 2:00
212-288-6400
asiasociety.org
In June 2016, Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, who lives and works in Beijing, was arrested by Chinese authorities at Xining airport in western China for “disrupting social order” supposedly over a luggage dispute, then was admitted to a local hospital with various injuries and illnesses. He was shortly freed following international outcry, and he went right back to making films about Tibet. The forty-eight-year-old writer and director, who spoke at Asia Society in 2010, returns to the institution this weekend for “Pema Tseden: Celebrating a Tibetan Voice,” a two-day free retrospective of all four of his feature films, two of which will be followed by Q&As with Tseden, whose Chinese name is Wanma Caidan. One of the films Tseden will be speaking after is his 2011 drama, Old Dog, a beautifully told, slowly paced meditation on Buddhism’s four Noble Truths — “Life means suffering”; The origin of suffering is attachment”; “The cessation of suffering is attainable”; and “There is a path to the cessation of suffering” — that ends with a shocking, manipulative finale that nearly destroys everything that came before it. In order to get a little money and to save the family’s sheep-herding dog from being stolen, Gonpo (Drolma Kyab) sells their Tibetan nomad mastiff to Lao Wang (Yanbum Gyal), a dealer who resells the prized breed to stores in China, where they’re used for protection. When Gonpa’s father (Lochey) finds out what his son has done, he goes back to Lao Wang and demands the return of the dog he’s taken care of for thirteen years. “I’d sell myself before the dog,” he tells his son.
And so begins a gentle tale of parents and children, set in a modern-day Tibet that is ruled by China’s heavy hand. Gonpa’s father doesn’t understand why his son, a lazy man who rides around on a motorized bike and never seems to do much of anything, doesn’t yet have any children of his own, so he pays for Gonpa and his wife, Rikso (Tamdrin Tso), to go to the doctor to see what’s wrong. Meanwhile, the old man keeps a close watch on his dog, wary that Lao Wang will to try to steal it again. Writer-director Tseden (The Sacred Arrow, The Weatherman’s Legacy) explores such themes as materialism, family, and attachment in a lovely little film that sadly is nearly ruined by its extreme final scene. Old Dog is screening January 28 at 2:00; “Pema Tseden: Celebrating a Tibetan Voice,” being held in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition “Unknown Tibet: The Tucci Expeditions and Buddhist Painting,” also includes 2005’s The Silent Holy Stones, 2009’s The Search, and 2015’s Tharlo.
Founded in 2008 by Charles S. Cohen, the Cohen Media Group is an independent theatrical production and distribution company that specializes in high-quality new films and restorations of classic cinema. The Quad is paying tribute to the group’s first decade of operation with the twenty-two-film series “A Journey Through Cinema: Ten Years of the Cohen Media Group,” continuing through January 25. On January 22 at 5:00, the Quad is screening the widely praised 2015 CMG documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut. “In 1962, while in New York to present Jules and Jim, I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question: ‘Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He’s rich and successful, but his movies have no substance,’” French Nouvelle Vague auteur François Truffaut wrote in the preface to the second edition of what he called “the hitchbook,” the seminal film bible Truffaut/Hitchcock. “In the course of an interview during which I praised Rear Window to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, ‘You love Rear Window because, as a stranger to New York, you know nothing about Greenwich Village.’ To this absurd statement, I replied, ‘Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.’” Truffaut was determined to change the prevailing belief that British director Alfred Hitchcock was a maker of studio fluff. “In examining his films,” Truffaut continued, “it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock. That is what this book is all about.” The tome compiled a weeklong series of conversations between the thirty-year-old Truffaut and the sixty-three-year-old Hitchcock — the talks began on Hitch’s birthday — in the latter’s Hollywood studio office, with Helen Scott serving as translator. Although the interviews were recorded for audio, no film was shot; instead, Philippe Halsman took still photos. The story of the unique relationship between Truffaut, who as of 1962 had made only The 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player (he was in the midst of finalizing Jules and Jim), and Hitchcock, who was preparing his forty-eighth film, The Birds, is told in this splendid documentary, which cleverly reverses the order of Hitchcock and Truffaut’s names from the book it’s based on. Writer-director Kent Jones (head of the New York Film Festival), cowriter Serge Toubiana (former editor in chief of Cahiers du Cinéma) and editor Rachel Reichman lovingly combine Halsman’s pictures, audio clips from the original sessions, scenes from many of Hitchcock’s films (and a few of Truffaut’s), close-ups of dozens of pages from the book, rare archival footage, and new interviews with ten directors from around the world who weigh in on what makes Hitchcock’s work so special, so illuminating, so influential.
