Zen Noir: A Review

Zen Noir: A Review

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This film requires patience. Some experience of long retreats or sesshins wouldn't hurt either for fully understanding the complex emotions of the characters.

If you have both of these, it's a pretty good film. Not great, but good.

According to the trailer page on youtube:

http://www.zenmovie.com If David Lynch, the Buddha and Woody Allen all took acid and made a surrealist mystery, this would be it! ZEN NOIR is a brilliantly funny, award-winning independent film that explores zen buddhism, meditation, life, death and spiritual enlightenment.

I think that sums it up well enough. I'm not sure about you, but I have to be in a particular kind of mood for a Woody Allen movie, and a very different mood for a David Lynch movie, and a different mood altogether for something on Buddhism. So mixing the three together didn't set very well.

The high point, the moment where it all pays off, is a monologue by the aged Zen monk about an experience long ago with his teacher, an orange, and an ominous phone call. Until then the mix of Lynch and Woody Allen styles made it difficult to get into the movie. But if you've managed to get into it even just a tiny bit, to empathize with our main character, to see his suffering as one with your own, this monologue will make it all worth it.

If not,you've just watched a very weird movie. Lynch's haunting and confusing style isn't there enough for you to feel it like you do with "Mulholland Dr." or "Lost Highway," and the wit of Woody Allen, while there at times for a good, if awkward, laugh, doesn't sustain the movie.

Practitioners of Zen might even be more annoyed by the odd portrayals of life in a Zen Temple, the blending of surrealism and actual practices leading more to confusion than "spiritual enlightenment."

This film does deserve our attention, though, as an example of the emerging genre of Buddhist fiction in the West. It will be, whether we like it or not, the first taste of Zen Buddhism for many viewers and I can't help but cringe a bit at that. For instance, I'm not sure if lines like:

"[I'm] just a very dedicated layperson."
"What's a layperson?"
"A person who can still get laid."

give a very good impression of Zen life. But then this is surrealism and the Buddha on acid, isn't it?

I'm very curious about what others thought of it, especially given their backgrounds. I'm no s