Recently the small Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has been creating some interesting films and one of these is Dechen Roder’s I, the Song (2024). She previously made her reputation as music video producer and her first short film Original Photocopy of Happiness (2011) picked up awards at various international film festivals. As a female director, she seems comfortable tackling topics that some male Bhutan filmmakers might not consider.
Dechen Roder’s I, The Song opens with a crisis. Nima (Tandin Bidha), a schoolteacher, finds herself in the middle of a storm when a viral “blue” video seemingly depicts her in an intimate sex act. Nima is reserved and concerned about propriety. After all, there have been severe ramifications in the wake of this widely circulated “blue film.” Everyone believes it’s her in it, despite her insistence against it. Her denial is met with disbelief and resistance. She loses her job.
During the opening scene at a school, we see colorfully costumed children on an auditorium stage who are singing a sweet English song. The protagonist Nima (Tandin Bidha), a teacher, is called to the office of the principal (Kezang Dorjee aka Kazee) and told she’s fired because she can’t be around, it’s too disturbing. She was in a viral sex video. Except, she insists, she wasn’t; it’s not her. She phones her boyfriend (Dori Wandgi), who works in a tourist venue hosting traditional Bhutanese folk plays. He is sure that the woman in the video is Nima.
So, begins Nima’s search for her double, starting with the video itself, which she hasn’t seen, though everyone in Bhutan otherwise seems to have done. (As is pointed out later, the country has a population of seven hundred thousand and it’s almost as if everybody knows you.) She visits a somewhat seedy local video dealer (Karma Tenzin), and though the video is too short to be on a disc, he gets her a copy of it on her flash drive. Actress Tandin Bidha, who plays both Nima, the wrongly dishonored teacher, and Meto, the mysterious woman she tries to track down.
Studying the video she now has on the flash drive, she finds the woman in it has a mole on her face, but Penjor says she might have drawn it on for the video. The mole is our only clue that these are two women, except that Nima’s road trip/investigation locates numerous facts about the woman, Meto. Indeed, we learn more about Meto in the film than about Nima. A closer look at the video reveals corner tag referring to the town of Gelephu in southern Bhutan. So Nima gets in her car, drives south to Gelephu, and checks into a hotel there. She goes out exploring the narrow streets of Gelephu. Outside one storefront window can clearly be heard two men in conversation talking about the very video she has seen and studied:
“No. It doesn’t look like her!”
“You are right. She doesn’t look like…”
“She would do that kind of thing.”
“Yes, you are right.”
She enters the bar, and they greet her by name: Meto. She doesn’t know the name, but then one of them helpfully directs her to Moon Bar, where she’ll find Tandin, Meto’s ex-boyfriend. No-one has seen Meto around for a while. At Moon Bar, a musician with an acoustic guitar is singing on stage, a song about someone who left him.
This turns out to be Tandin (Jimmie Wangyal). But, as he explains, he has no idea where Meto is. Later, Nima follows him from the place, a drunk woman on his arm, to his upstairs flat, sitting outside on the stairwell. When she’s waiting there again two days later, a girl comes out and says to her, “hey, you’re Meto.” Nima knocks on Tandin’s door and forces Tandin to talk to her.
It is here that the film takes on the flavor of a Hitchcock thriller, like a twist of Vertigo, (1958). Tandin invites her in for tea, and tells the story of how he met Meto when she auditioned as singer and dancer, and he tried to throw her off with his crazy playing, but she kept up. This is the first of a series of flashbacks that explain much about Meto.
Meto appears in a short bob hairstyle and wearing a red dress. After the flashback, we are back with Tandin and Nima drinking tea. After Nima makes it clear that she is searching for her missing doppleganger, Tandin replies: “If you find her, don’t tell me anything.” But she ends up pursuing a series of new clues about Meto’s whereabout.
The director has said that the film was loosely inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Vèronique and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River. She has never watched Hitchcock’s Vertigo. With all those references in mind, I, The Song is a highly personal work steeped in the Bhutanese culture. As the title suggests, songs are essential to the film. In the words of Dechen Roder: “All our lives are actually songs that can never be contained.” This idea not not far removed from Alain Resnais’ in his masterful film, On connait la chanson (1997). The musical styles in “I, the Song” span from Dzongkha songs to more recent popular music.
The two women share such an uncanny resemblance that Nima is mistaken everywhere at first glance for Meto. She counters this perception initially but over the course of the trajectory, there are subtle, profound shifts within her. Slowly yet firmly, the way Nima views the world, with what’s permissible, opens up. Meto is livelier and assertive about her desires. Both the women are, however, united in their individual sense of resolve.
I, The Song drifts beyond the carapaces of realism into disconcerting, dreamlike territory. What’s true and tangible dislodges and morphs into a fascinating cross between the perceived and internalized. As Nima’s search deepens, she begins borrowing from the stories of Meto she hears and projects her own repressed self, seeking liberation. Director Dechen Roder realizes this through a brilliant, smartly realized blurring of the lines dividing the two women. Where one ends and the other sparks off – it gets increasingly shadowy, even as the mystery around Meto seems to vaporize.
