"Samsara" (Moviemail 07/09/12)

1982’s Koyaanisqatsi, directed by Godfrey Reggio and photographed by Ron Fricke, was a landmark countercultural doc, using staggering imagery and a hypnotic Philip Glass score to warn how modern life’s accelerated pace had come to tip the planet out of balance. Fricke has since taken up the directorial mantle (and this cause) himself, first with 1985’s Chronos, then 1992’s Baraka, and now Samsara, which ventures East both physically and spiritually, inspired by Buddhism’s “wheel of life” philosophy. To Lisa Gerrard’s score, the sun rises over the desert and sets over the city; the tide comes in, and goes out; and people mill around in timelapse footage, as insignificant as ants, only with a more marked and deleterious effect on the planet around us.

In a way, this is a public information film in gleaming 70mm: Fricke has gone to extraordinary lengths to get us to wash out our Marmite pots and put them in the right recycling bin on the right day. Samsara’s precise colour palette is what digital projection and HDTV were invented for, making painterly distinctions between the reds, yellows and golds of the desert, the lush greens of the jungle, and the purple and blue-painted faces of Far Eastern dancing girls. Against which the drab greyness of our cities as viewed from afar starts to look damning indeed: even the whites of the pilgrims lapping Mecca start to look like so much soapy water swirling down a plughole.

When the film takes the long view, it’s undeniably spectacular: in a single helicopter shot, Fricke nails the near-cosmic unreality of the newly developed Dubai, rising up out of nowhere as a rich man’s playground. Elsewhere, you may just have to clench your teeth at some crude juxtapositions – between robust American gunlovers and petite, sobbing Asian women, say – intended to impress upon us the notion we’re all thoughtless automatons hellbent on crushing the Third World one Whopper at a time. There’s so much eye candy viewers may lapse into diabetic shock, but the editorial proves equally sobering and hectoring: as Fricke’s regular inserts of statues make clear, Big Buddha is watching us.

Samsara is in selected cinemas.