China’s young people who trade
parties for peace at a mountainside hermitage
Summoning
the Recluse opens
on a traditional Chinese landscape painting of a remote village surrounded by
trees, rivers and misty mountains. Small, thatch-roofed homes blend into the
vista, evoking the humble, contemplative lifestyle of the Buddha’s Middle Way.
While a somewhat realistic and plausible image, the scene likely didn’t reflect
the lived experience of its artist. Landscapes of this kind were painted by
Chinese scholar-elites, responding to the societal strains of their time by
idealising nature and extolling the spiritual teachings of the ancient past.
The pull to withdraw into the natural world for its beauty and simplicity is a
centuries-old undercurrent of Chinese society – and in the age of steady
urbanisation, social media, mass commerce and, in general, breakneck-paced
change, it’s no surprise that it persists today.
The
Beijing-based director Ellen Xu’s Summoning the Recluse (2016)
follows a band of urban millennials who’ve left their busy lives behind to seek
inner peace at a mountain hermitage. The group gets by with sparse resources
and few modern distractions. Much of their time is spent working the land,
meditating and catching up on ancient Chinese philosophy, which was missing
from their Westernised school curriculums. It’s all quite a departure from the
cliché of the hermit as an old man with a white beard living in solitude. For
some, the stay will be a temporary spiritual refresh, but at least one resident
has no plan to leave.
While each
interviewee expresses a sense of freedom and inner calm as they immerse
themselves in nature and away from societal expectations, a tension between
modern convenience and fully embracing a return to nature percolates throughout
the film. While one young man says their setup is ‘not primitive enough’ due to
small conveniences such as lighters and matches, in another scene, a young
woman eagerly poses for a cliffside qigong-inspired photo-op,
snapped by a fellow ‘hermit’. The questions emerge: is the group truly
embracing a return-to-nature lifestyle, or just touring it? And can inner quiet
exist alongside connection and modern convenience?
Through
interviews and unobtrusive filmmaking, Xu finds that, like most of us who
struggle with the pros and cons of technology, the young hermits are still
striving to find this balance. Indeed, the same young man who believes they‘ve
embraced too much convenience still thinks it acceptable to ask for outside
help in the case of illness, and finds the fates of truly hermetic monks who
die alone in caves, entirely cut off from the outside world, to be ‘very
tragic’. With these practicalities, the millennial hermits appear to recognise
the fantasy of nature as it’s presented in the opening landscape painting. As
per their own set of rules, and inspired by spiritual teachings, they seem to
seek the Buddha’s Middle Way in modern life, carving their own path within
themselves. And in documenting their story, the film clears room for
contemplation in each of us sharing the ideal of inner tranquility in the
digital age.
Summoning
the recluse | Psyche Films
