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Idealism is the lacing on Lesley Ann Patten’s film, “Words of My Perfect Teacher,” now playing at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The film is a humble documentary, peering intimately into the world of three Buddhists who view themselves as students and the man who is their teacher, or guru. The film delves into Buddhist ideology in an unconventional way.
Instead of explicitly explaining the religion and its views, Patten expects the audience to understand the religion and its importance. There is a subtle, albeit strong, subtext that Buddhist principles are not only inherently important but, more than that, universally accepted.
Patten writes and directs the film so that it is conversational, an open dialogue with the individuals involved and the audience watching it.
While Patten introduces us to the teacher, Khyentse Norbu, and occasionally comments on events and people, the movie is not fully narrated. Most of the film consists of the interactions between the three students, with occasional conversations involving the teacher.
The three students, Patten, Luc Dierckx and Louise Rodd, have a deep belief that in order to achieve Zen in their lives, or even to understand life and their purpose in it, they must learn from the very best teacher.
They believe Norbu is a source of great wisdom and will lead them to understanding of life’s greater principles and importance.
Norbu, however, refuses to accept his role as this all-important – “omniscient” is used once to describe him – teacher. He loves soccer and watches it with serious commitment. He enjoys traveling, is soft-spoken and is more aloof than his students expect or like.
The students’ frustration with their absent teacher grows with the progression of the film, but they keep seeking what it is they’re looking for.
I believed for the first half of the movie that the teacher purposefully made himself absent and aloof in some attempt to encourage his students to learn on their own, without his constant assistance.
By the middle of the film, I realized that Nordu didn’t have some master plan for his pupils’ education; he’s just really that aloof.
The film eventually gets boring. You keep expecting some major realizations or breakthrough, but it never happens. And while this lack of great epiphany encourages sleeping, it is also the key to the movie’s essence.
These three students, who begin the film bright-eyed and excited to grow in their intellectual pursuit of peace, harmony and ultimate understanding of the universe, end the film with an intangible and unspoken but clear and radiant understanding that perhaps the key to enlightenment is simply living.
They discover that with or without the perfect teacher, life will continue, and as long as we know ourselves we will continue to grow, change and become better people, if we set our minds to it.
The film is also set during the early 2000s and captures footage of several tremendously world-changing events. The group goes to Germany for the England-Germany World Cup game, gets back in the United States right before Sept. 11, 2001, in time to see the collapse of the Twin Towers and acknowledges the negative implications of the United States’ war with Iraq.
Patten’s “Words of My Perfect Teacher” is far from perfect, but one of the lessons she learned can be a lesson to us all.
“I realized none of us will have true happiness until we learn to deal with our mind because the mind is the starting point of all suffering, entrenched views, closed hearts and prejudice.”
