The film begins with the lamas painting mandala with colored sand, and ends with the destruction of their own carefully drawn artworks, which happens to be the topic of "reincarnation". But what exactly is this movie about? We followed the giant 70mm film through the earth's worthy and unnamed natural wonders, cultural monuments, religious buildings, ruins and uninhabited deserts; over the 21st century city, we stared at Tangled highway bridges and traffic melted into colored lines, and the high-rise buildings that gleamed in the night sky like alien worlds, we flew over them; we saw the rich and the poor, but We also see white-collar workers working in Tokyo office buildings or female workers working like machines in large factories in China, people have to desperately squeeze into those cans of sardines in order to survive; we see burly men covered in tattoos He caressed his daughter very tenderly, and saw the young American girl holding a firearm with a calm face; in a large supermarket in the United States, people were consuming carts after carts of beautifully packaged goods, but they didn't know that they were in the stinking garbage heap. , there is also a group of people who are consuming what they have already consumed; those old cars, motorcycles, boats, TVs, computers are all squashed, dismantled, recycled, and replaced by new products from third world factories We see chickens, cows, and pigs being systematically raised and slaughtered. Behind the mechanized production of meat is the huge consumer demand of 7 billion people on this small earth. In a nearly 2-hour documentary, we saw rich and poor, vitality and desolation, ancient and modern, real and false, confrontation and isolation, war and death... We saw human beings and ourselves in it.
But what exactly is this movie about? Everyone is asking this question. After drawing a 21st-century Ukiyo-e with a movie lens, the director himself did not say a word about the scene in front of him (it is true that the director's own answer can be seen in some passages, such as the part of plastering his face, crazy and sharp). He chooses to leave the film's suspense to us—the audience and the subjects—to answer. This trick is both cunning and clever.
For me, I can't answer, because this "Reincarnation" is not a question at all. This is a Ukiyo-e about today's world. Facing it is like facing the world, and facing a huge world, you can't summarize it with a specific, single, and comprehensive evaluation. In the face of this world you can only be speechless, in the face of this world you can only say that it is like this. Just like when you face the mirror every morning after getting up and washing your face, you will never be able to make a correct evaluation of the person in the mirror. You never know what's going on in his head.
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