Siddhartha In Seattle

By RICHARD CORLISS

Any old hack can direct movies that make you cry. It's a simple matter of putting onscreen some wrenchingly sentimental image (sad-eyed dog with broken leg, widow on deathbed, noble peasant gunned down by soldiers) while a dozen violins tremble on the sound track. A filmmaker's real challenge is to create what German director Wim Wenders has called "emotion pictures": films that move you in a fresh way, with images that speak to the intelligent heart. Bernardo Bertolucci makes emotion pictures. He illustrates complex issues with indelible, seductive, ravishing images. And in his 12th film, Little Buddha, the Italian director has created his clearest statement of what it means to see things -- literally see them -- his unique way.

Little Buddha hopscotches the world from the kingdom of Bhutan to Seattle, Washington, and leapfrogs millenniums from the Buddha's birth in 2500 B.C. to today. In Bhutan a Tibetan monk named Lama Norbu (Ying Ruocheng) hears that an American boy, Jesse Conrad (Alex Wiesendanger), may be the reincarnation of an important lama. Incredulous at first, Jesse's parents (Chris Isaak and Bridget Fonda) are sufficiently impressed by Lama Norbu's otherworldly sweetness that they allow the boy to keep company with him, and eventually to journey to Bhutan with his father and two other candidates for the exalted position of reincarnated holy man.

This could turn into a story of Moonie-like brainwashing or, at least, a Spielbergian audition for spiritual star quality. But Bertolucci is remarkably open-minded; he is eager to entertain and then to accept the beliefs and rhythms of another, older culture. The film's loveliest sections are those that concern the life of Siddhartha, the Indian prince who renounced worldly pleasures and religious extremism to find the Middle Way of Buddhist truth. Siddhartha is played with improbable persuasiveness by Keanu Reeves, another of Bertolucci's eccentric choices in Little Buddha that pay off.

Bertolucci has always been less interested in telling a predictably coherent story than in evoking strong feelings. His political epics (The Conformist, The Last Emperor) are really interior melodramas about small people overwhelmed by sweeping events; his intimate studies of sexual desperation (Last Tango in Paris, The Sheltering Sky) are really about the places -- Paris apartments or the depths of the Sahara -- where troubled people get lost. Little Buddha is a story of quite small people, three modern kids, who rise to great spiritual demands, and of Jesse's parents, who come to terms with truths that are much greater than their problems.

After 30 years of making passionately skeptical movies, Bertolucci has made a film of the most sophisticated simplicity. His triumph is to make you see the Buddhist world through his eyes. It shines like innocence reincarnated.