Butler's Cinema Scene

Master Namkhai Norbu and Yeshi Norbu

“MY REINCARNATION”  My rating: B-  (Opening March 23 at the Tivoli)

82 minutes | No MPAA rating

Every son has to come to an accommodation with his father…either that or get out of Dodge.

But when Dad is one of the most revered men in Tibetan Buddhism…well, that adds some new wrinkles to the situation.

Jennifer Fox’s documentary film has been two decades in the making. Back in the early ‘90s Fox began filming the activities of Choogyal Namkhai Norbu, a Buddhist master who fled his native Tibet in the late 1950s and relocated to Naples, Italy, where he got a university job teaching Asian languages and, on the side, Tibetan Buddhism.

Unlike many Buddhist masters, Norbu isn’t a monk, though he studied in a monastery. Once in Italy he married a local girl and became the father of a boy and a girl.

The boy, Yeshi, is the main subject of “My Reincarnation.” Even before Yushi’s birth, Namkhai Norbu dreamed that his new son would be the reincarnation of his uncle, a rinpoche  (or guru) who remained in Tibet and died in a Communist prison.

In grainy old video footage we see Yeshi as a young adult. He says he and his father aren’t close. He says he knows about the reincarnation story and isn’t moved.

So  Yeshi goes off to work for IBM, marries and starts his own family. He’s a good career-driven corporate citizen.

He’s pulled back into his father’s world when Norbu develops cancer. And then the Old Man in effect cures himself through meditation.

But he’s old and weak and as a good son Yushi spends more and more time with his parents.

The more he hangs around his father, the more Yushi is visited by odd dreams, dreams of Tibet (which he’s never seen), even a dream of his great-uncle on the eve of his death in prison.

And, little by little, the doubter is pulled back into the fold.

“My Reincarnation” is as methodical and undramatic as Buddhism itself. But in this placid approach Fox discovers a story of inevitability and destiny.

Gets you to thinking.

| Robert W. Butler