ONE AND FOUR: SCREENING INTRODUCTION BY PAUL DUANE
ONE AND FOUR
The historical influence of mainstream Hollywood genre cinema on what is sometimes called ‘world’ cinema is a fascinating subject. Akira Kurosawa took a lot from John Ford, and of course the entire history of ‘spaghetti’ westerns is one of Europeans repurposing and subverting a classical Hollywood genre, revitalising it in the process.
This Tibetan film is an interesting twist, because it takes the work of one specific Hollywood director – Quentin Tarantino – and combines elements from two of his notable films to make something that feels both oddly commercial and intriguingly strange.
The story begins firmly in arthouse territory, with a man alone in a rugged, desolate landscape, possibly with a debilitating hangover, faced with having to deal with an intrusion on his lonely privacy. Sangye is a forest ranger, a man in retreat from society and humanity. Played by notable Tibetan actor Jinpa, he seems both vulnerable and stoical, the archetypal hermit.
The film is based on a short story, and seems to dip into the world of Kurosawa’s Rashomon as much as it’s a gloss on The Hateful Eight’s remote, snowbound claustrophobic setting, it’s an influence acknowledged by the director Jigme Trinley. He plays around throughout with Tarantino’s signature subject of impostors and dubious identity (see also the parlour game sequence in Inglourious Basterds), which of course Tarantino himself borrowed from John Carpenter’s The Thing, another snowbound mystery where every character is potentially lying to the others.
The film’s bilingual nature – with some characters speaking Mandarin and others Tibetan – was a feature of the shoot, as some of the actors couldn’t understand Tibetan and found themselves isolated, adding to the characters’ paranoia in a way the director found fortuitous and which added to the realism of the piece.
The director has said that the title could be taken to refer to the four men and the film’s other ‘character’, the deer who watches them from a distance. Nature and the environment are a silent, ever-present backdrop to the human drama unfolding and the secrets and lies we imagine are present in all the interactions between the characters here. But eventually the film comes to its climax, which seems to me very much influenced by another Tarantino movie, but to reveal which one would very much be a spoiler. The ending of this film doesn’t please everyone, and may seem abrupt and unsatisfying to some, but it certainly ends with a bang, as they say. It leaves a number of mysteries unexplained, but there’s no hard and fast rule that every story has to explain every element in full. Your enjoyment of One and Four may depend on how much you like being left to figure things out for yourself. It will certainly stimulate some interesting post-screening conversations!
Paul Duane, Irish writer, filmmaker and producer
3 January 2023