DECHEN RODER: I, THE SONG (2024) New York Asian Film FEstival 2025TRAILERTracking down one's more risqué double in BhutanThis film from Bhutan about a staid schoolteacher who goes on a search of her lookalike from a viral sex video that has ruined her reputation is a beautiful, hypnotic, exotic little film full of the clothes, music, tea drinking and Himalayan scenery of its setting. A French writer has called it "a leap forward for the cinema of Bhutan." The authentic and ethnic are muted into beauty in the filmmaking even if details are fudged toward the end. But maybe we aren't meant to take it literally anyway. A wise lady the protagonist meets says "whether dreams or reality, it's all illusion" and perhaps this Buddhist view underlies everything here. What does this pursuit of a double mean? Here, maybe it's new possibilities, but also the search for a mysterious siren, because the risky lady seems to have disappeared, only to reappear, perhaps as the protagnoist in makeup, or in flashbacks.
Key to the effects are the rather sphynx-like actress, Tandin Bidha, who plays both Nima, the wrongly dishonored teacher, and Meto, the mysterious woman she tries to track down; and the actor Jimmie Wangyal, who plays Tandin, the singer and songwriter in a bar in Gelephu, near the Indian border, where a bit of detective work scrutinizing the infamous video leads Nima. Wangyal has a slinky brooding quality; Bidha is a bit of a Greta Garbo herself.
A school opens the film with colorfully costumed children on an auditorium stage who are singing a sweet English song. The protagonist Nima (Tandin Bidha), a teacher, is called to the office of the principal (Kezang Dorjee aka Kazee) and told she's fired because she can't be around, it's too disturbing. She was in a viral sex video. Except, she insists, she wasn't; it's not her. But even her boyfriend Penjor (Dorji Wangdi), caught hosting traditional Bhutanese folk plays, is sure it is.
And so begins Nima's search for her double, starting with the video itself, which she hasn't seen, though everyone in Bhutan otherwise seems to have done. (As is pointed out later, the country has a population of seven hundred thousand and it's almost as if everybody knows you.) She visits a somewhat seedly local video dealer (Karma Tenzin), and though the video is too shoert to be on a disc, he gets her a copy of it.
Studying it at home, she finds the woman in it has a mole on her face, but Penjor says she might have drawn it on for the video. The mole is our only clue that these are two women, except that Nima's road trip/investigation locates numerous facts about the woman, Meto. Indeed we learn more about Meto in the film than about Nima.
In Gelephu, where her double lived, everyone calls Nima Meto, or at least thinks she is Meto's sister. Asking around for Meto, Nima is soon directed to Moon Bar and the entertainer there, Tandin, Meto's boyfriend, but she has left him and he is angry and wounded and will not speak of her. She turns to others. A sprightly girlfriend tells how she and Meto wanted to enter a song and dance competition. Actually, she tried out with Tandin. One of the film's most memorable scenes is the flashback to Tandin improvising wild and crazy tunes on his guitar to unnerve Meto, while she shows her strength and determination, singing and dancing to it anyway. It's quite an unexpected kind of meet cute,and an indication of the important seedy grace and glamor Jimmie Wangyal lends to this film and the skill in altering him for flashbacks and Tandin Bidha to become Nima's double.
Meto isn't at her former workplace either, a small printshop (beautiful and beautifully lit in a yellow light like a lot of this handsome film whose dp was the Indian born and trained Rangoli Agarwal, a woman like the director). But there the boss Phuntsu (Tshering Dorji), who again at first takes her for her double, suggests Nima go to Meto's home village, and she drives there and meets the familiy of Meto. Yes, they too generally mistake her for her double, notably Meto's grandmother Aum Tshomo (Choney Zangmo), who doesnt see very well anymore.
Another strain is introdced at this point of the lost sacred song which the gradnmother says has been "stolen" (apparently for a popular recording) and begs to have returned to the village so she can die in peace. Nima can't grasp how a song can be "stolen" or "returned." Dechen Roder's idea (as she explains in an
interview) is to paraellel the idea of a "stolen song" with a stolen experience - because it turns out the intimate video of Meto was shot without her knowledge. Grandma wants to song back; Meto (as well as the collaterally damaged Nima) wants her intimate experience back. It's interesting that on the surface the film refers to things like invasiion of privacy, perhaps social media and the internet, and the damaging exploitation of tradtional culture, but makes something beautiful, haunting and poetic about it - sometning one online writer for a website called
Dirty Movies sees in detail as riffs off Hitchcockk's
Vertigo. Director Dechen Roder ceertainly combines the ethnic, the poetic, the musical and the realistic in interesting ways, though in the latter half some of the editing shows a loss of continuity.
I, the Song, in Dzongkha, 113 mins., premiered at Tallinn Black Night Nov. 19, 2024 winning the Critics Picks Best Director award. It wasalso shown at Goa Nov. 28 and at Vesoul Asian Film Festival. Screened for this review as part of the Jul. 11-27, 2025 New York Asian Film Festival.
SCHEDULE:
Monday July 14, 3:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
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