Film

Siddhartha (1972)

Director: Conrad Rooks

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A glossy feature-length ad whose genesis is Hesse's slight novel about a beautiful Brahmin who hits the road in search of truth. Accompanied by his baby-faced friend, he freaks out with the Sadhus in the wild, listens to Buddha in his grove (exit friend as monk), fucks in silhouette with a rich courtesan, and makes a lot of money as a merchant. He drops out again to find ultimate and absolute contentment ferrying folks across a river. The familiar Hesse dialectic between profligacy and asceticism is followed faithfully enough, and there's small chance of anyone leaving without receiving the message that there is no path to truth, that to search is not to find, and that 'everything returns' on the wheel of life. Unfortunately the film is made with such lack of imagination that it's impossible to get the true feel of the states of mind our Bombay ad-star goes through. Everything becomes a soft, vaguely symbolic spectacle, a love story in a chocolate-box landscape. JDuC.

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