Whenever or however earth was birthed, evolved or created, its beauty mark lies bordered between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India. Although reprehensibly lagging behind globalization, Nepal’s elevated villages, where showers appear to be infrequent, spare clothes a luxury and indigenous citizens are fated to a life of marriage and children followed by farming until death, are ostensibly a paradise, unadulterated by tourism.
For farmer parents who have been bestowed a rare opportunity to give up their one-year-old child to the Buddhist monastery, where clean clothes, frequent showers and daily meals are plentiful — at the cost of never seeing him — the infant’s memory of his birth parents will inevitably fade to darkness. “Unmistaken Child” pulls back the blanket shrouding the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, as neophyte director Nati Baratz trails Tenzin Zopa — a former disciple of the deceased Lama Konchog — during a four-year search for Konchog’s reincarnation. The “Unmistaken Child” and the child’s parents’ arduous decision weighs heavily on self-interest and self-sacrifice.
A higher power had an impeccable eye in fashioning this rural landscape. With paintbrush at hand, dotted silver undertones scintillate within white waterfalls plummeting hundreds of feet into the valley. Forest greens appear to be splashed across the mountainside, masking its humdrum grays, overlooking remote villages nestled in rustic Nepal, home to Yak herders and peasant farmers.
In retrospect, indigenous Nepali families call single dorm room-sized huts home, where light penetrates rotting planks repelled apart at the seams by severe weather and ricochets off minute particles to elucidate heavy, freely floating clouds of dust in space. Often-used urban technologies that we take for granted are sparse — aside from a few land lines and toys — and virtually absent among the land’s elderly farmers, whose heavily dirt-clogged pores collectively exacerbate the lackluster bronze leathering of their skin as they hack and harvest hay with unmistakably farmers’ hands under sweltering sunlight.
Baratz, shying from delving into the history and theology of Buddhism, prefers to skim the surface of Buddhism as a practice, documenting the veneer of Buddhist funerary rituals with snapshot glimpses inside the mountainside monasteries. But, more importantly, he shows rarely viewed rituals non-Buddhists may pigeonhole as superstitious.
According to Buddhist theology, Konchog’s death and proceeding cremation released his spirit to repeat the cycle of reincarnation in an infant of 1 to 1 1/2 years old. Sand patterns reminiscent of footprints coupled with the direction of the cremation smoke provide the initial evidence to begin Zopa’s search for his master’s reincarnated body. Using laminated cards of symbols, a randomly spun dial and few calculations, a Buddhist astrologer determines the reincarnated boy’s father’s first initial — “A” — the syllable “TS” of the boy’s birthplace and the boy’s chubby figure.
After Zopa’s remarkable journey by foot and helicopter, he befalls upon an infant who meets the specific parameters and appears to instantaneously recognize — or fancy –Konchog’s crystal beads. The Dalai Lama reviews the potential reincarnation and puts him through a final test, requiring the child to ascertain Konchog’s former material possessions.
An air of caution should be exhibited in watching this Nati Baratz documentary-cum-epic. Your guard is irrelevant here, but questions will inevitably arise, only to be left in the air unanswered by Baratz. Like, whether Baratz, relying on the success of this documentary, had a human hand in the success of these coincidences upon coincidences? It’s hard to comprehend how Zopa managed to find a child, within the neighboring countries, who fulfilled every criteria and managed to flawlessly pluck out all five formerly owned objects of Konchog among a collection of like items. Maybe it’s luck, maybe it’s fate or maybe it’s something else all together. As of the moment, the skepticism has yet to be confirmed or disproved.
“Unmistaken Child,” exposes a monk’s human fragility, mitigating preconceptions of Buddhist monks, who are envied for their iron-like mental stamina from frequent meditation sessions. Following Zopa is like following a best friend. His uncontrollable tears for his deceased mentor, smiles for the simple pleasantries of nature and disgust for the decrepit state of his mentor’s former hut appear to be raw and unrestrained despite the cameras recording his every motion. The search for his reincarnated master kills two black birds with one heavy stone. The journey slowly teaches Zopa independence — his life was scheduled by his master — and reinvigorates purpose back into his life.
3 stars out of 5.
