107 min | NR | February 9, 2024 | Roadside Attractions
Bhutan holds a mock election to teach its people how democracy works. A village lama sends a young monk to fetch two guns by the full moon, while an American scours the country for a rare antique rifle. Everyone wants the gun. Nobody agrees on what it is for.
Bhutan, 2006. The king steps down to hand power to the people, and officials fan out to remote villages to stage mock elections so citizens can practice voting. In one mountain hamlet, an old lama instructs his young attendant Tashi to bring him two guns before the full moon. The film is a satire about a country importing a democracy it never asked for and discovering that every tool of the modern world arrives with its own logic. It is really about what gets lost when a contented people are told they need something more. Pawo Choyning Dorji frames the joke without ever raising his voice.
Tandin Wangchuk plays Tashi with a patient blankness that makes the monk’s errand both funny and unsettling. He hunts for firearms the way another man shops for groceries, untroubled by what they are for. Tandin Sonam plays Benji, the local fixer, with the jittery calculation of a man who knows exactly how much money is at stake. Harry Einhorn plays Ronald Coleman, the American collector, as a polite predator who mistakes Bhutanese courtesy for a closing deal. Pema Zangmo Sherpa plays the election official Tshering Yangden with brisk conviction that curdles as villagers refuse to perform an anger they do not feel. Deki Lhamo plays Tshomo, a mother whose household splits along party lines, and grounds the comedy in real domestic strain.
Pawo Choyning Dorji writes and directs with the same unhurried eye he brought to Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. He shoots the highlands in wide, static frames that let the comedy build inside the composition rather than the cut. The camera holds on a monk walking an empty road or a television glowing in a home that just got electricity. Sound design does the quiet work here. The film tracks the arrival of modernity through the noise it drags in, the radios and campaign loudspeakers and television sets that crowd out the silence the village used to keep.
The film’s gentlest joke is also its sharpest. A people who already have everything are being handed the freedom to fight over it. Dorji never sneers at democracy and never romanticizes the old order. He simply watches a self-sufficient culture absorb a Western gift and notices that the gun and the ballot travel the same road. The closing image reframes everything the lama has been planning, and it lands because the film earns its patience.