MOVIE DAYS IN KATHMANDU : Bernardo Bertolucci entwines the dazzle of a $35-million production with the paradoxes of Nepal’s ancient--and evolving--culture

THERE IS A FESTIVE AIR INBHAKTAPUR TODAY. YOUNG WIVES ARE CROWDING THROUGH the tiny, dusty alleyways of the fairy-tale Nepali town, chattering excitedly, all in their Saturday finest, as they pose for cameras on brocaded swings or next to golden horses, while scores of others are standing in line to wander through a wonderland of silken canopies, next to a ceremonial pool, in front of ancient temples repainted in dazzling reds and golds. Little girls are huddled over bottles of hotel shampoo, and urchins are playing hide-and-seek around a silver van on which is written, simply, “TAO FILM.” Usually, this is a grubby little square where men sell daggers, demon masks and other kinds of spell, the poorest, most medieval part of an alley that is the heart of one of the poorest countries on earth. But today, the “City of Devotees” is a blaze of colors, awash with gilded parasols, glittering with saris, like nothing so much as a toothless crone attending a wedding in her finest silks.

The five-mile trip back to Kathmandu takes only 45 minutes--traveling on a three-wheel motorized rickshaw that bumps and lurches and stalls over roads well-furnished with gods (in the form of cows). “Speak the Truth,” cries the sign across the road. “Perform Your Dharma. Do Not Fall From Self-Studies.” Most of the walls around it are scrawled with messages saying, “Vote for Sun” or “Vote for Tree,” accompanied by pictures of these objects (since roughly three Nepalis in every four cannot read, political parties are designated by universal symbols, and ballot forms come with drawings as well as names.)

Back in the city, in the Hotel Yak & Yeti--an opulent fantasy of a place that looks like the overheated daydream of some Victorian-educated Calcuttan who spent his youth around St. Petersburg--a very different kind of show is taking place. Ponytailed Italians and Brits in leather jackets and a few bronzed trendies who look as if they’ve just stepped out of L’Uomo are sitting around chatting--as incongruous in this ragged town as a group of Nepali farmers would be along the Via Veneto. You can spot them from a hundred yards, with their expensive haircuts and silken scarves, talking, in accents redolent of Trastevere and Belgravia, of the Christian Dior wallet they’ve just lost, or the BBC broadcast they caught by mistake on the hotel TV.

Today is a holiday, but call sheets are already posted in the lobby for tomorrow’s pre-dawn start. The two principals, Keanu Reeves and Rajeshwari, will have to be in Bhaktapur by sunup. This fairly typical day of shooting in Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest epic, “Little Buddha,” will also require the services of “208 Members of the Court, 50 Court Guards, 36 Palanquin Porters, 12 Grooms, 11 Indian Girls and 8 Kapadi Players.” “Special Requirements,” the sign goes on, “10 Horses. Props: Palanquins (minimum of 3). Lunch: for 140 people (and for 350 extras).”

Right now, as the streets empty out (it is nearly 8:15 p.m.), the people, if not the extras, are gathered in the Yak & Yeti’s tiny nine-seat bar, half-lit by the erratic flickerings of a black-and-white TV. The techies are propping up the bar, telling dirty stories; the rich women are sitting down, telling even dirtier stories. Their voices drift above the Icebergs and Tuborgs they are drinking, above the chic assistants with their Tintin books, above the framed prints of maharajahs and slain tigers. “This man over here with an Australian accent--he is Italian!” “A fire in Windsor Castle? You’ve got to be joking!” “See, he thinks he’s D. W. Griffith. Matter of fact, I think so, too.”

IT IS THE DILEMMA THAT EVERY TRAVELER FACES--ESPECIALLY EVERY traveler who wants to tell his friends about the Hidden Paradise he’s discovered: The very fact of giving a name--or a face--to the place you love changes it till it becomes a place you hardly like. Talk about how unspoiled somewhere is and you’re almost inviting its despoliation. When someone gives you the address of the unknown Shangri-la he’s found, you’re forced to wonder whether he’s serving its interests or his own.

And it is the dilemma that every developing country faces--especially a country as destitute and desirable as Nepal: When approached by the affluent modern West, do you take it in or take it on? Nepal has opted for the first solution and smilingly accepted so much of the outside world that tourism is its largest source of foreign currency; Bhutan, nearby, has chosen the second option and closed its doors so firmly that in all its history it has seen fewer visitors than go to Dodger Stadium on a single day.

It is also an issue that grows ever more urgent as filmmakers take themselves to ever-more-remote locations to shoot their zillion-dollar productions (Bertolucci’s main rival for the Christmas market seems to be Oliver Stone’s new Vietnam movie, “Heaven and Earth,” which is shooting, with almost exactly the same schedule, just a little further down in Asia, near Phuket). As the developed countries recolonize their former properties on film--the French making three movies in a single year in Vietnam, the British sending television crews to every corner of the Empire--and as the dollar-for-dreams transactions multiply, so, too, do the questions. How does a poor country turn down the exposure and hard cash that a movie company promises? Yet how can it possibly acquiesce in a process that often ends up dismantling the place in life so as to reproduce it in art? Making a movie in Nepal can easily change the country so much that the “real Nepal” finally exists only in the movie makers’ cans.

In this instance, the plot is a relatively simple one. In recent years, Bertolucci, the great maverick visionary of the modern cinema, has all but turned his back on the West in the hope of bringing something different--something wilder and maybe deeper--back to the rest of us. After shooting “The Last Emperor” in the Forbidden City and “The Sheltering Sky” in the Sahara, he decided to make his new film, based on his own story about an American family and the life of Prince Siddhartha (later Lord Buddha), in the hidden kingdoms of the Himalayas. The movie itself has a kind of ascetic, renunciatory air to it: There are only a few marquee names (Keanu Reeves, playing the Buddha, and Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda, playing the parents of a contemporary American boy who’s suspected of being a Tibetan incarnation), and the story will have a fairy-tale simplicity that leaves even its publicists a little speechless. The maker of “Last Tango in Paris” is shooting what he calls a “film I could take my children to.” The laureate of revolutionary alienation is giving us a happy ending. Bertolucci is, in fact, hoping to bring Buddhism to a mass-market holiday audience.

But since Tibet is still more or less closed (and site now of some bloody oppression), the 120 movie makers have descended on the 14th-Century metropolis of Kathmandu. Given the blessing of the Dalai Lama, and having included in the cast a rinpoche , or reincarnated lama (who also happens to be the spiritual adviser to the king of Bhutan), they arrived last fall--for three months of shooting--in a country as dependent on foreigners for its livelihood as an actor on a director. His aim, said Bertolucci upon arrival, was to do for Nepal “what ‘The Last Emperor’ did to China, and what the Department of Tourism has never done.”

Done “to” or “for,” though, is the question--an especially immediate question when you consider that the budget of the $35-million movie could feed every person in the Kathmandu Valley for a year. When you know that “The Last Emperor” made more money than Nepal earned from exports in 1992. When you hear that a single night’s stay in the Yak & Yeti would cost the man in the Bhaktapur street a year’s salary. And when you bear in mind that the filmmakers will be shooting in--and largely remaking--Bhaktapur, a “living museum,” in Andre Malraux’s words, said to be designed in the shape of the god Vishnu’s conch; in Patan, the town once known to Tibetans as Yerang, or “Eternity,” and said to be the oldest Buddhist city in the world; and in Bhutan, a country so remote that every citizen must still, by law, wear traditional medieval costume, and every building must be constructed in 14th-Century style.

FOUR DAYS LATER,BHAKTAPU IS TRANSFORMED. THERE’S AN ELEPHANT over here, and over there a winged god. Whole buildings have disappeared entirely overnight, and 20-foot walls have sprung up to enhance the square’s symmetries. Local mask-sellers have been recast as courtiers, and schoolgirls--now princesses in priceless gowns--are clicking away at one another with Instamatics, hardly able to get over the fact that they are getting paid a year’s wages for lying down. Around them, street kids in caps that say “Friend” (in America they’d say “X”) are careening around boxes of Cinecitta lenses, or poring through containers piled high with orange filters. A few boys are crawling over temple roofs to set up banks of hypermodern lights, while old women are busy pushing electrical cords off temple platforms with their feet. Boys with “Assistant Crowd Master” buttons are doing everything possible to assist the crowd in making chaos, while, here and there, a few security guards are languidly peeling tangerines.

Occasionally, a duck walks into the square, or a raucous wedding procession, led by a marching band and a dervishing trumpeter (all in English military regalia). Now a red-dotted Hindu mendicant wanders in, now a howling madman. “The quality of the film is based on mystery,” I remember Bertolucci telling a local newspaper, The Independent (“Beneath and Beyond the News”), when he arrived. “The serenity of the shooting wherever we go will be maintained.”

Today is another blazing blue day, but the whole square is swathed in a mist so thick you cannot see three feet in front of you. Grannies are hobbling past with hankies to their mouths, and unshaven Italians are sputtering. Around them, the mist, billowing out of long, cylindrical smoke machines, snakes in and out of all the passing bodies, compounding the reality games that everyone is playing. Is this art or is it Memorex? Which of these steeples have been here since Chaucer’s time, and which arrived just yesterday? Which of these walls is 500 years old, and which ones are only an eighth of an inch thick?

From the vantage point of my private perch (at an upstairs window of the tiny National Art Gallery, just above a collection of Kama Sutra prints), I watch Bertolucci, in a white hat, and Keanu Reeves, with the long black ringlets and the ornate raiment of a privileged Indian prince (the unenlightened Buddha-to-be) steal over lines of sleeping extras. “Hey, give me two!” shouts a Bruno in the corner, with a pair of Nepali eyes on his baseball cap--”One boy and one girl!”

A little later, I decide to visit the Sahara Company Location Office in Bhaktapur. I find the office on the second floor of the walk-up, rock-bottom Shiva Guest House (whose 90-cent rooms are described as “small and Spartan,” even by the budget travelers’ Lonely Planet guide). Across from the office is a sign: “Hot Shower (Only in Winter) from Morning to 10:30 a.m. Please Deposit your Precious Goods to the Manager for Safety (Otherwise no Responsibility). Cloth Washing is Strictly Prohibited.”

Fighting back the impulse to cloth-wash, I wander farther in. One of the two Sahara Company location offices consists of nothing but a mat that says “Hallo.” The other consists of three Nepali teen-agers in blue jeans who are taking their responsibilities very seriously. One of them presents himself as “Oasis” (he’s certainly getting into the Sahara spirit!), and tells me, in bullet-trained, somewhat eccentric Japanese, of his struggles to get a visa for Japan. Behind him, on the wall, the shooting schedule calls for Lotus Tree, Ascetics, Snake, Mara’s Army, a Mandala Cremation, Bamboo Screens, Fire Pit and Stunt Horses. Of such small details are $35-million Oscar-winners made.

IF ACADEMY AWARDS WERE GIVEN FOR GRACE UNDER PRESSURE, FOR SHEER bloody-minded persistence in the face of adversity (the Werner Herzog Award, it should be called), Bertolucci by now would merit a Lifetime Achievement Award. For “The Last Emperor,” he had to deal with 32 interpreters, 3,000 extras and a 3-year-old star, filming in courtyards that had not been opened in 50 years. For “The Sheltering Sky,” he undertook a six-month shooting schedule, in annihilating heat, amidst beggars and nomads, that left him saying, admiringly, of Debra Winger, “I have never seen any actor capable of such suffering.”

Nepal, though, promises to be the ultimate challenge. For it is still a wonky and somewhat off-kilter place, where women with babies stroll across the runway of the international airport as you land, and men in ancient helmet-hats spread their newspapers along the landing strip. It is a country where, two hours after I arrived, the minute it grew dark, all the lights in town went off (as they did, more or less by law, every other day, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.) It is a country where, even in a five-star hotel, I needed an operator to place a call across the street (and usually failed in any case). The “Health” section of my guidebook was 40 times longer than the “Tourist Information” section.

You know you’re in a different world in Nepal--even before you learn that the country is exactly 15 minutes ahead of India (and 13 3/4 hours ahead of Los Angeles) when you see the banners stretched across the road wishing you “All the Best Happiness of Happy New Year 1113.” The local telephone directory (for the year 2049) devotes one entire page to a warning, “Beware of Fraud,” and usefully advises you to “Use your fingers for dialing” (maybe that’s why I could never get through); on the front page of the main newspaper, The Rising Nepal, the headlines shout: “HM Greets Albanian President” and “Cooperation Vital to Check Evils.” In Nepal, restaurants still serve “Roast Buff” (in deference to the Hindu reverence for the cow, they slaughter water buffalo instead), and even in expensive hotels, the toilet paper comes on rolls that say, “This answer book has 16 pages including the title page. Make sure that it is so. Do not write your name or that of your College/School/Examination Centre . . . .”

“The Hotel Kathmandu,” warns the sign that greets you at the airport (site of two major crashes in the months before the Bertolucci crew arrived), “Where Things Happen.”

Things were certainly happening while I was there. One day, a generator gave out. The 9-year-old star of the movie, used to the polluted commotion of New York, got asthma as soon as he was set amid the high, clear silences of Bhutan. Extras (who in “The Last Emperor” were People’s Liberation Army soldiers, and nothing if not well-drilled) did not infallibly turn up at the crack of dawn. Yet the gods, it seemed, had strange tricks up their sleeves. One day, a cyclone swept through Nepal, up from Bangladesh; the next day, the snow caps were sharper than they had been for 20 years.

The arrival of the Bertolucci traveling show to make a fairy-tale spectacular in Nepal (“Ten times more sumptuous than ‘The Last Emperor,’ ” in the words of a New York publicist) has, of course, been the talk of the town--in fact, the country--for months. Everything seems to revolve around it. Shopkeepers reel off locations as if they were production assistants (Now Bhaktapur, Durbar Square, then Patan, Swayambhu . . .”), and teen-age entrepreneurs, in between selling you Manjusri statues, will tell you of the businesses that received $1,200 a day for being redecorated.

A whole kind of folklore has grown up around the production: There is the tale of how the Italians found the perfect tree (for the Buddha to find enlightenment under), just next to the perfect river--but not, alas, at the perfect distance from the perfect river (so they raised the tree onto a platform and gave it plastic roots). There is the tale of the chef who flew in from Rome to make pasta at the Yak & Yeti, and of the day Prince Andrew’s former flame, Koo Stark, appeared on the set with photo credentials and a zoom lens trained on Reeves.

A handful of local sophisticates profess to be unimpressed by this. Nepal has seen 100 productions come and go, they say; why, the place is now called “Kollywood.” One day, indeed, I read in the newspaper Weekend how, ever since Dev Anand’s “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” Nepal has hosted an “upteenth number of other directors from as far as Hong Kong, Japan and the U.S.A., who have been coming out with films that have won critical acclaim and commercial success.” The blockbusters it named: “The Himalayan,” “The Night Train to Kathmandu,” “Mahaan” and “Story of Zen Master.” Another day, the local paper included a feature on the world premiere of “Pukar,” an $80,000 Nepali production being launched by a member of Parliament, at a party “attended by Nepali film luminaries.” In truth, most of us know the place only from a few establishing shots with Eddie Murphy superimposed on them in “Golden Child.” And Nepal is still too poor to be indifferent to money (is, in fact, distinguished by its merry mercantilism).

So local merchants will gladly total up the numbers for you. “See, they have spent 10 million ($220,000) just to redo Bhaktapur,” says one man, twinkling over his tie. “They changed a whole row of 50, 60--no, 100--houses, and to every house, they gave 6,000 rupees. To some workers they are giving 300 rupees ($7) a day, sometimes 600--to some it is even 1,000 rupees. For us this is much money. Usually, we make 30, 50 rupees in a day.” Stories are told of how a farmer was asked to stop burning wood for a day, since his smoke showed up in the background of a shot. Sure, he said, if you give me 5,000 rupees. They did, and he received a whole year’s wages for taking a whole day off.

It all too easy, perhaps, to cast the rich visitors as the villains here, and the poor country as their victim. On paper at least, Nepal is one of the most helpless countries in the world. The statistics could hardly be more melancholy: five doctors for every 100,000 people; about 4,700 hospital beds in the entire nation. One child in every five dies in the first few months of life; the average Nepali man is dead by 55. Even when compared with 25 other countries of Asia, many of them among the most luckless in the world, Nepal is near the bottom. There is one telephone for every 680 people here (Taiwan, by comparison, has one for every three), and the infant mortality rate is four times worse than China’s. Though tourism has shot up over the past 25 years, population has increased even faster--from 7 million to 20 million--so that as soon as money comes in, it trickles out.

Yet Nepal, it seems to me, is a paradoxical country, paradoxical enough to make things more complicated than they seem. More than most places, it leads a double life: the one in reality, which seems relatively tranquil and benign, and the one on paper, where it looks completely desperate. Yes, you could say, Bertolucci is making a movie in a Hindu kingdom ruled by a living incarnation of Vishnu; but you could also say that he’s shooting in a country run by a graduate of Eton and Harvard (King Birendra wears all three caps). Yes, you could say, the whole of Kathmandu had only one restaurant as recently as 1955; but by now, there are 100 on every block and nearly every one of them serves lasagna, moussaka, chop suey, tacos and the continent’s most celebrated apple pies.

Nepal is, in fact, something of an impossible phantasmagoria: At daybreak, its ancient streets teem with swamis carrying tridents and dogs and babies crawling through the mud. But around them, in the Rimini Pizzeria, teen-age boys are briskly preparing a video triple bill: “Brain Donors,” “Frank and Joney” and “Regarding Hennary.” At night, the old trade routes are all but deserted, and flickering candles turn faces into strange, medieval masks; but when you go into a candlelit stall you find U2 throbbing across the system above the finest spinach-and-mushroom enchiladas you’ve ever tasted. Nepal is a little like a Hollywood conceit already: a halfway house between the conveniences of the world and the other world of Tibet. A modern world set against ancient props.

Nepal cannot survive without foreigners, moreover: Almost half its government revenue comes from foreign aid, and tourism is its bread and butter. In that context, Bertolucci is the biggest benefactor to touch down in years, and poised to make the lushest tourist brochure in the kingdom’s history. “ ‘Peter Lucci’ is hiring 2,500 Nepalis,” one student tells me excitedly, leaning against a phallic Shiva temple. “Usually we are jobless. Nothing doing.” Some of his profits the Italian is donating for the restoration of Bhaktapur, and already he has completed one fairy-tale ending by giving a major part to a 10-year-old shoeshine boy encountered in the street.

“You see the beggars near Pashupathinath Temple?” one local travel agent asks me as we bump across squealing, squawking alleyways. “Begging for 25 paise, one rupee? If it were not for tourists, we would all be like that. And this film will be an advertisement for Nepal, an advertisement for Bhaktapur.” He pauses. “But then tourists will come, and it will not be like the movie.”

INEVITABLY, THE ARRIVAL of a group of Westerners to make a film about the founder of an Eastern philosophy has not been without controversy (imagine some Nepalis coming to the Middle East to shoot the life of Jesus!). The movie that is being called “Little Buddha” around the world will be released in India and Nepal as “Little Lama,” and in both cases, the diminutive is not an ideal adjective (can one imagine a movie being called “Little Mohammed”?) Some Nepalis are complaining about a line in the script that has the Buddha being born in India, when it is well-known that he was born in Lumbini, in Nepal (though he found enlightenment in India). Some Tibetans have grumbled about the lama’s guru being played by a Chinese actor (while others have claimed that the Chinese are trying to discredit the inevitably pro-Tibetan script).

Best of all, the tiny Communist Party of Nepal has complained about the Sahara Company’s wish to tear down advertising billboards. Sitting in their office, under a picture of Kim Il Sung, they are perhaps unaware that Bertolucci is the most famous leftist director of his generation, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party until 1978. As the movie “City of Joy” discovered not long ago, the line between compassion and condescension, between exposing a country to the world and allegedly exploiting it, is as murky as in any love affair.

Yet it is hard really to find much substance to the charges, hard, for example, to see how Bertolucci will affect Nepalis’ thinking any more than the usual groups that come here (“World Hindu Federation,” says the welcoming banner strung across the main road; “International Symposium on Snow and Glacier Hydrology”), hard to see how he would do any more damage than Mira Nair, the Indian-born director of “Salaam Bombay!” and “Mississippi Masala,” who was planning her own $36-million movie of the life of Buddha across the border, in India. “Of course you do affect people culturally,” says Bertolucci’s producer, Jeremy Thomas, “because you come in, like spacemen, with relatively unlimited money to spend, and a certain vulgarity. But we try to be a benign production. By not being bombastic. By not being colonialists. You try to give back a certain part of yourself.”

Besides, Nepalis can scarcely claim that the foreigner is taking liberties with something that should remain invisible when the first thing that greets arrivals at Tribhuvan International Airport is a somewhat cartoonish mural showing highlights of the Buddha’s life. And a country that specializes in pizzas and spaghetti cannot complain too loudly about an Italian making a movie in the East.

Most of all, it can hardly be said that Bertolucci is bringing corruption to an otherwise unspoiled country. For Nepal has developed at the speed of light (and flight) in the past 20 years, and it seems to know how to take the world in without being undone by it. And those anxious about how the film will affect Tibet need only listen to the Tibetan rinpoche , who has declared that “the making of this movie is more important than the building of 100 monasteries.” Five years ago, the National People’s Congress in China was busy debating Bertolucci’s presence at the very moment when the Academy was conferring on him nine Oscars. The next morning, the debate was over.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, OF COURSE,not to wonder what will happen to the crowd masters when the movie goes off to its next locations--in England and Seattle--and the boys who worked for 1,000 rupees a day are back to 1,000 rupees a month, and the people who saw their hometown garlanded in silks are back to seeing it bare, and waiting for the next multimillion-dollar epic to come to town. The schoolgirls will be left with their bottles of hotel shampoo, and Oasis will be back with his visa application for Japan. That is the tease of every foreign visit: a sudden windfall, followed by a just-as-sudden withdrawal. Love you and leave you.

Yet it’s impossible, too, not to wonder what “Peter Lucci” and his 13-Oscar crew will bring back from this hidden treasure of everyday magic and what kind of beauty they will bring to our local cinemas. At the beginning of “The Sheltering Sky,” John Malkovich’s character referred to the now-familiar distinction between the “traveler” and the “tourist,” and Bertolucci is one of the few modern directors to bring that distinction to the screen, to dig beneath exotic surfaces to find something even truer and more troubling, to go beyond postcard vistas and tourist shots to a sense of how places can not only surround you but transform you. He is one of the few men of the cinema to produce the equivalent of travel literature on the screen--not a David Lean epic, that is, but something more individual and strange, full of irreverent majesty, and eerie with a sense of the inextricability of terror and seduction, the way in which fear can be romantic as much as romance can be fearful. Bertolucci is one of those rare artists who takes us to places inside ourselves, and so domesticates the alien (as suggested by the French title of “The Sheltering Sky,” “A Tea in the Sahara”). And in film after film, as he makes grandeur intimate and brilliance lucrative, one recalls that he was first and foremost a poet, the son of a poet and the winner of a prestigious poetry prize at Rome University before he ever turned to film. His is the cinema not of sight but of vision, and the story of a prince, surrounded by decadence, who turns his back on it to pursue self-study, is one that he has been exploring--and perhaps experiencing--for half a lifetime.

There is in Nepal a kind of transaction you encounter every day. You go into a store and are greeted by a 9-year-old businessman. He shows you a piece of “authentic Nepal culture” that is, in all likelihood, made by, and for, a group of Germans. You know it’s not quite genuine, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. You mention a price. He mentions another. You come up, he comes down, and the deal is finally done. Both of you know that the price is a little high, and ridiculously low. Both of you also know that, by the time you leave, the kid’s got your cash, you’ve got a lovely object that you can show off as the echt Nepal, and both parties have a warm sense of profit.

That, I hope, is how it will turn out when the Buddha comes to the Cineplex. Bertolucci will probably give Nepal a more alluring and uplifting face than it has ever had before. Nepal will probably end up $4 million richer and better able than ever to sell itself as a place of unspoiled wonders. And we? We can get a taste of Himalayan magic, and of the transformative powers of an ancient kingdom, all for a mere $7.50. Not a fairy-tale ending, perhaps, but surely a Nepali one.