Walk With Me, 2017.
Directed by Mark J Francis and Max Pugh.
Featuring Benedict Cumberbatch (narrator), Thich Nhat Hanh and Brother Phap De.
SYNOPSIS:
A meditative documentary about a community of Zen Buddhist monks and nuns dedicating to mindfulness and following the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Even if you’ve not heard of Thich Nhat Hanh himself, chances are you’ll have heard of what he practices. It’s mindfulness, which has become a buzz word over the past couple of years. And he is a Zen Buddhist master who’s established a community in the French countryside, populated by his followers who are dedicated mindfulness and spreading the word about it.
Walk With Me opens and closes with the sun. It flickers through the trees at the opening, at the close it rises over the mountains, all creating an overwhelming feeling of peace. And the time in between is taken up by an intimate and remarkable study of life in the community: not so much a definition of mindfulness itself but what it means to the people who practise it and how it relates both to the outside world and their own former lives. Encouraging us to live in the moment as well as, in its most basic form, slow down and breathe the film’s release couldn’t be timed more perfectly. If there’s any time of the year when we tend to reflect on the past and how to move forward, it’s now.
That initial tranquility is a recurring theme, with the lingering camerawork encouraging you to focus solely on the object in front of you. After a while, the mellow tones of Benedict Cumberbatch emerge, reading extracts from Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching. While he’s billed as a narrator, he’s more of a commentator as the lines have been chosen to emphasis what’s gone before or what’s coming, making them more like chapter headings.
Stillness and peace permeate everything the monks and nuns do, including the walking of the title. They walk in groups in the countryside, taking slow, deliberate steps which would be not just an anathema but a total nightmare to city dwellers – hell being other pedestrians – so they have time to appreciate the world around them, the air they breathe. They do everything else in much the same way – eating in silence to appreciate every mouthful. And there camera dwells on the wildlife, emphasising the connection with mother earth, most memorably and beautifully, an enormous cluster of ladybirds swarming round a window.
It isn’t all idyllic, though. We eavesdrop on a conversation between a young monk and a young nun, while she is cooking food for their teacher. They both admit to feelings of boredom. He likes to get away from the community occasionally to combat the boredom, returning refreshed – almost the reverse of what’s being advocated by the film. She enjoys cooking, but doesn’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over again, even though she finds she ends up doing exactly that.
Walk With Me is, inevitably, a slow film: it couldn’t be otherwise. Some may find it too slow, but it is worth sticking with. Like mindfulness itself, what you take away from it depends on you: it may be a lot, or just the odd nugget, but it’ll be hard to feel you’ve come away empty handed, even if it only confirms something you’ve always thought. Just take an open mind.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Freda Cooper. Follow me on Twitter.
Originally published January 4, 2018. Updated April 11, 2018.
