[In the following review, Strick offers a mixed assessment of Little Buddha.]

Continuing the symmetry of The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky, Bertolucci completes his oriental trilogy with [Little Buddha,] another tale of innocents abroad. While it will doubtless come as no surprise to committed Buddhists, the journeys of Pu Yi and the ill-fated Moresbys from lives of useless luxury to the informative extremes of destitution turn out closely to parallel the path taken by Siddhartha, whose serene childhood—lotus flowers sprouting at every footfall—left him ill-prepared for the inevitabilities of adulthood.

Conveniently, Bertolucci's own preference for privation, venturing where no camera has gone before in his attempts to evade Western consumerism, echoes the same learning process, the need for reassurance growing more acute with the advancing years. Borrowing from Paul Bowles, he concluded The Sheltering Sky (where survival proved more valuable than death) on a note of gloomy hope, recommending that we savour every minute of the final countdown. With Little Buddha, in effect a post-countdown story of the after-life, he puts his faith in recycled humanity, with rebirth on the agenda as a comforting, if necessarily unproven, prospect. In his final images, which for a moment seem set to repeat the miraculous (and confirming) instant when Siddhârtha's bowl flows against the current, he offers reincarnation like a kind of plague dust, destined to convert us all to the living dead.

In aiming his film at a young audience, on the pretext that we are all like children when learning about Buddha (who also achieved wisdom through innocence), Bertolucci creates an inevitable tension. The fear of death can easily be lifted by the promise of resurrection, but it's the promise that needs substantiating. Up to a point, the world of an adult is authority enough, but beyond that, attainment of enlightenment by the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the essentials of Buddhism, involves painfully complex, and decidedly non-filmic, considerations. Avoiding complication, Bertolucci has had to resort to simple mythology, staging a pantomime that will excite curiosity but provides no answers. Even so, his self-denial only goes so far; he underpins the splendid melodrama of Siddhârtha with a strange, fragmentary story of his own (plus recognisable grace-notes from Wurlitzer and Peploe) which almost reverses the riches-to-rags legend by taking average all-American boy Jesse on the adventure of a lifetime to be hailed as a near-deity on the other side of the world. This Spielbergian premise certainly achieves the right flavour for juvenile audiences, but at the same time it introduces ingredients for which Buddhism seems more placebo than panacea.

Were it not for the excellent humour with which Lama Norbu and his companion monks conduct their quest, as if fully aware of its more unlikely aspects, the whole exercise would seem irredeemably farcical. Instead, the general tone of incongruity as the small flock of monks tours the museums and monorails of Seattle, sitting on the floor instead of the furniture, acquires a fantastical charm of its own. More dissonant, as a result, is the Conrad family, occupying a house of breathtaking simplicity which sprouts from the ground in a jolt of computerised conjury to survey the entire city like a watch-tower of ominously tinted glass. The Conrads are clearly suspicious of the Tibetans, yet leave their son alone with them for hours, and although the family's financial future seems bound up with the unseen partner, whose death leaves Dean curiously distraught, it is Jesse's mother who stays in Seattle while the boy and his father go to the Himalayas.

Whole chapters of the Conrad story, with its hints of the same incestuous triangle as La luna, seem to have been denied us, leaving unexplained the hovering camera over Dean as he stares suicidally at a motorway or later the intense scrutiny with which he studies Norbu's demise, as if awaiting a major revelation. Played by Chris Isaak in a state of high anxiety, by contrast with Bridget Fonda's immaculate poise as his wife, his concluding appearance as castaway in the Seattle bay seems to leave Buddhism very much at sea. This despite the orange sunset (as we may expect from Storaro, the whole film is a dialogue of blues and oranges) and the implied correlation between Norbu's ashes and Lisa's pregnancy.

The other paradox of Little Buddha is, of course, its own magnificence. Where the eponymous nontheist, reasonably enough after six years as a ascetic, opted for moderation in all things, Bertolucci and Storaro provide panoplies of costume, landscape and construction that are seldom less than sumptuous. The palace home of Siddhârtha is lavish in the crowds and colours of a children's fable, and even when the prince discards the excesses of ignorance and settles for the wilderness, the majesty of the riverside and the gleeful intrusion of special effects lends his mental struggle an overwhelming grandeur. With frequent sky-high shots of patterns and movements, Bertolucci makes spectacle a theme in its own right, celebrated interminably by Sakamoto's drifting score, at first a marvel of foreboding, later a shapeless package of crescendos. As Siddhârtha, Keanu Reeves confronts himself with an affable authority; for a refreshing change, this is a philosophical hero who only has to sit and think, and whether or not his example offers any kind of inspiration, it is unarguably fascinating to watch.