‘The Monk and the Rifle’ review: What does Bhutan want with the West?

If the first film from Bhutan to travel the world was ‘Lunana: A Yak at School’ (2019), Pawo Choyning Dorji’s debut film, the second to do so is also the director’s second, and the first that the country has produced in five years. It is set in 2006, during the Bhutanese transition from monarchy to democracy, to contemplate how a remote village faces the changes that the process brings – the arrival of television, the internet, mobile phones, electoral processes – and reflect how greed, jealousy and the rivalries that result from them disrupt coexistence just as the growing number of antennas spoil the dazzling landscape.

https://www.elperiodico.com/es/ocio-y-cultura/20240801/critica-pelicula-el-monje-y-el-rifle-butan-pawo-choyning-dorji-106407091

Meanwhile, Dorji cleverly appropriates the archetypes of the ‘western’ precisely to satirize the interventionism of the United States and its obsession with firearms; if that is what democracy has brought to the West, one wonders, why is it necessary in Bhutan? In any case, despite the good hand it shows with irony, ‘The Monk and the Rifle’ prefers to be light and friendly than to show its claws, and to walk slowly between characters and plot threads without delving into one or the other in order, not without a certain cynicism, to serve as a A showcase of Bhutanese customs and natural beauty for the kind of Western viewers who are unable to understand why anyone would question the benefits of having the right to vote.