The Gold Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain – a Review, an Analysis

After the film ended in the theatre one of the women who was sitting beside me told me that it was such a nice film for her, I asked her if she understood the ending. She told me that she didn’t, but it does not matter to her as she enjoyed the rich visuals of Himalayas in the valley of Kashmir. What I understood was some films work for some people at different levels.

The film is about an old Shepherd who sets to find out a crashed army plane in the mountains. The mountain is considered to be sacred as there is a folklore of ‘Naga’ among the shepherds (maybe referencing to the snake of Shiv) which says that nothing can happen in that mountain without the willingness of Naga, and a rumor says that whoever goes to that mountain if found by Naga can be gulped down by the Naga himself. It’s a riveting plot for me but it does not work, why? Because there was a sense of detachment with the visuals from the beginning of the film, but that does not mean that the detachment is for the characters, the old man who banters with his helper cracks the audience sometimes but, when you see a film whose story is just half-a-page long along with too over longed sequence where we see a landscape for quite a sometime and then something enters the frame and then moves for a while and then gets out of the frame, it becomes too prolonged for me.
It is not clear to me that why that shepherd went out on that journey because I don’t see the greed in him for money that unlike the old man’s helper Bahadur who also seek out just for his greed, but as people say: greed is universal, so I can buy that thought. Or maybe the shepherd set out on this journey just to redeem himself…too philosophical! Behold your horses because the ending is rather more too philosophical, surreal and absurd for reasons which don’t have any meanings. I feel like in the pretext of abstract or philosophical endings the filmmakers try to hide their flaws in the stories and which I strongly felt for this film.
The Gold Laden Sheep and the Sacred Mountain can be a good film for someone like the lady who was sitting beside me who just loved the shots of valley of Kashmir, but for me who completed his studies in Dehradun which was surrounded by mountains, just prolonged mountain visuals don’t work for me.