An Italian film company has lost contact with its cast and crew on location in India. Only useless tapes arriving by mail attest to their existence... then the video-cassettes stop arriving and our hero is hired as a driver for the expedition sent out to find the crew.

Concrete though their goal may be, the group of Western seekers falls under the spell of the East and the result is an adventure in its most contemporary form - dharma burns with video-cams, 4-wheel-drive drag races to Kathmandu, spike heels clicking through ancient monasteries - fraught with Eastern mysteries that seize the story line like a tropical fever and then subside.

The ruined tapes revive on location and can now be seen. In them, a knight in shining armor wends his way through the Orient, meeting every encounter win increasingly inappropriate chivalry. As the fantasy world imperceptibly appropriates center stage, a third level, the realities of international politics, manifests itself in brief, sinister flashes, including the ultimate brief sinister flash...

• TPB
  1/19/2021