Cinema: Hot Air

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE MEN Directed by Peter Brook Screenplay by Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook

Meetings with Remarkable Men is the hip '70s answer to Hollywood's oldtime biblical kitsch. Once Cecil B. DeMille re-created the glory days of Moses in glorious Technicolor; now Director Peter Brook is giving the same treatment to G.I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949), the philosopher whose Zen-like quest for spiritual truth has greatly influenced the modern human-potential movement. Though The Ten Commandments and Remarkable Men are theologically antithetical, they are cinematic first cousins. Both films suffer from an excess of piety, a shortage of humor and an infatuation with desert vistas. Still, DeMille's muscular, campy Moses (Charlton Heston) is a hell of a lot more fun than Brook's wimpy, self-effacing Gurdjieff (Dragan Maksimovic). Human saintliness plays better on the big screen when it is accompanied by thunder and lightning. Brook's film is based on the mystic's autobiography. The tale begins in a small town on the Russian-Turkish border where Gurdjieff grew up. From there, the young seeker begins a series of exotic adventures: encounters with various eclectic holy men, a trek through the Gobi Desert and finally a rendezvous with a mysterious sect known as the Sarmoung Brotherhood. These incidents are lavishly described by Brook, who builds the film to his hero's discovery of the meaning of life. In dramatic terms, this climax is roughly as exciting as the denouement of a murder mystery in which the butler confesses to the crime.

Though Brook has brought more new ideas to the stage than any other contemporary director, his film-making skills remain primitive; even his adaptations of his own brilliant theater productions (King Lear, Marat/Sade) have been flat. Here he is hobbled by lapses in continuity, fake-looking studio sets and a multinational cast. The scenery, much of it shot in Afghanistan, is breathtaking, but the photography is routine. What is needed is some sort of theatricality—if not the forthright vulgarity of DeMille, then at least the romanticism of David Lean. With its incongruous mix of radical content and stodgy style, Remarkable Men is as doomed as an artistic collaboration between Werner Erhard and Lawrence Welk.—Frank Rich