The Monk and the Gun 2024
The American makes an offer that cannot be refused. It is an offer that is airtight, he thinks to himself, an offer so impeccable it’s as sure as money in the bank. You give me your rare historical war rifle, he tells the grizzled Bhutanese man is he sits across from him in his home. You give that rifle to me, and in return I will give you as much of my fat duffel bag of cash as you want. Who could say no?
This is not a Don Corleone offer, but as in The Godfather the offer is a symptom of the system driving the one who is doing the offering. Corleone made the offer as a way of affirming a mob mentality that lives and breathes on the oxygen of power and control. In Bhutanese filmmaker Pawo Choying Dorji’s wry and thoughtful The Monk and the Gun, the American Ron Coleman is making the offer because, of course, money is the one thing sure to transcend cultures. People will listen to money, Ron assumes, and they will listen to it in Bhutan just as well as they listen to it in the USA.
Yet, to Ron’s profound chagrin, the answer is no. Or, rather, the answer is yes, but then later it becomes no when the local culture trumps the money god. Ron rushes excitedly to the ATM and back again to prepare for the purchase, then listens with his mouth and very soul agape as he hears the reason for the “no.” The local Buddhist lama, it turns out, has asked his protégé Tashi to procure for him two guns for the cryptic purpose of putting “things right again” by the time the next full moon has arrived. Tashi came by the old man’s house in the interim, asked for the gun, and it was given to him by the for no more than a handful of betel nuts.
The movie uses half of its first act to show us how, at the very time the gun drama is developing, the fabric of Bhutanese society is changing dramatically. Incorporating the real-life events leading to Bhutan’s first democratic elections in 2007, the film weaves in some narrative strands that eventually will converge with the story of the monk and the American who wants his gun. These strands add historical context, and they lead us to observe the interesting dynamic that the American is bringing his Western mindset into a culture newly open to Western ideals yet also deeply skeptical about what those ideals will mean for its culture. Western ideals may sometimes be helpful, but the rich irony is that Ron’s persistent offer may actually represent those ideals at their worst.
The scenes setting up this cultural context are fine, but they lack the comic and the stinger potency of the thread involving the American and the monk. We can easily forgive the lagging contextual scenes, though, because the final act of the film brings all the characters together for a new moon sequence that is at once funny, moving, and meaningfully stringent. (Part of the funny is a visual joke not to be missed, one that seems reverent and irreverent in equal measure. It employs an element seen often in coarse American comedy, yet uses that element in a way that is not coarse at all and that is completely foreign to the style of humor we see in so many American films.) Everyone is here at the end, finally getting a healthy perspective on the systems that have led them to do what they do. Ron’s offer could actually be refused, but maybe other other better offers can now be accepted. Offers like community, humility, and love.
