Already his sixth feature, Pema Tseden is the lead figure of the quiet surge of Tibetan cinema since the noughties,JINPA is an allegorical tale set in the few-trodden Kekexili plateau in China’s Qinghai province, an immense, desolate, high-altitudeno-man’s land whose denizens are few and far between, and it is where, the truck driver Jinpa (played by actor Jinpa, unkempt, macho and wearing a pair of dark sunglass presumably as an in-joke to the film’s name producer Wang Kai-War) run over a sheep materializing out of nowhere, which gives the film its original Chinese title “I ran over a sheep”, also the name of Tseden’s eponymous novel which the film is partly based on.
Opening with a Kham Tibetan “tit-for-tat” credo of revenge, JINPA fuses the brevity of its narrative with Tseden’s astounding flourishes of visualizing a barren land in its pristine rawness (a majestic long take eyeing the truck streak diagonally across its 4:3 academic ratio frame in its full stretch), wherein lies the exotic mystique beckons for travelers.
It takes a while for Jinpa to get over his accidental killing, before long, a solitary wayfarer, like the sheep, appears en route and Jinpa gives him a ride. The hitchhiker, whose name is also Jinpa (Phuntsok), is on a vengeful mission of killing a man who murdered his father 10 years ago, and Tseden’s deploys striking mirror image to leave a Manichaean impression.
After downloading his freight, Jinpa the driver tends to his personal affairs, including arranging a sky burial for the dead sheep and buying some mutton to visit his lover, here Tseden makes a cogent case of the duality between the spiritual and the temporal by playing up the anti-pragmatic way handling the dead sheep, which underlines the mortal sin of killing in Tibetan philosophy, the roadkill sheep simply cannot be consumed as comestible, whose soul is required to be transmigrated and flesh to be eaten by vultures.
Seemingly jolted by the awareness of this sinfulness, Jinpa the driver starts to track down Jinpa the hitchhiker, when he fetches up in an inn where the latter has visited one day prior, and fraternizes with the come-hither innkeeper (Wangmo), the two Jinpas’ paralleled occurrences - one is bathed in golden light and the other, told in flashback, takes on an illusory veneer with black-and-white graininess, blurry all around the edges - contrast each other (the differentiation in their manners and beverage preferences, a nice touch to allow western civilization flickering with an ironic undertone) and smudge the finitude between reality and dream, most magnificently, in Jinpa the driver’s apparent dream state, where he finishes his namesake’s unfinished business to conform to the opening credo, but in reality, it is quarter in a human’s heart that ends the vicious circle of reprisal.
Ended with a coup de maître of an assumed soaring vulture transpiring to be a passing airplane and the Tibetan adage “If I tell you my dream, you might forget it, but if I let you enter my dream, that will become your dream too.”, JINPA strongly signposts that Tseden has paid his dues and sufficiently acquired an auteur’s own facility and vision, a rosy future is set in store.
referential entry: Tian Zhuangzhuang’s THE HORSE THIEF (1986, 7.6/10); Ning Hao’s NO MAN’S LAND (2013, 7.2/10).
