Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache

Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache is a 2019 Nepali drama film written and directed by Khyentse Norbu. It was the director's sixth feature and his first shot in Nepal. The film premiered at the 17th Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico in October 2019 before screening at festivals in Asia, Europe and North America.^[1]

The screenplay follows Tenzin, a young Tibetan-Nepali entrepreneur in Kathmandu who has bought a former Buddhist temple and intends to convert it into a nightclub. After being told by an elderly lama that he has only one week to live unless he finds a dakini, he sets out through the alleys, courtyards and shrines of the Kathmandu valley in search of one. The film uses his search as a vehicle for an extended introduction to Vajrayana Buddhist iconography, with the dakini, a female embodiment of awakened energy, serving as both narrative goal and didactic device.^[2]

The film was produced by Pawo Choyning Dorji and the Indian producer Steve Cheng, with cinematography by the Bhutanese director of photography Jigme T. Tenzing. The lead role was played by the non-professional actor Tsering Tashi Gyalthang, whom Khyentse Norbu had previously cast in Hema Hema.^[3]

Production and Setting

Principal photography took place in 2018 across Kathmandu, with sequences shot in the streets of Boudha, Patan and the older neighbourhoods around Swayambhu. Khyentse Norbu has said publicly that the choice of Kathmandu was driven by his interest in a Newar Buddhist environment in which centuries-old temples coexist with rapidly modernising commerce, and that the film was designed to introduce contemporary Himalayan Buddhists to a tradition many of them knew only at second hand.^[2]

Themes and Symbolism

In Vajrayana iconography the dakini is conventionally depicted with three eyes, fangs and at times facial hair, traits the film's title cites directly. Khyentse Norbu has framed the film as an attempt to make tantric Buddhist symbolism legible without surrendering its strangeness, and reviewers in Asian Movie Pulse and Buddhistdoor have read the film as a teaching narrative wrapped around a thriller-like premise. The dakini Tenzin meets repeatedly across the city is shown alternating between elderly beggar, market trader, dancer and apparition.^[4]

Reception

Critical response was politely positive but limited. The film travelled the festival circuit through 2020 and 2021, slowed by COVID-19 restrictions, and received a virtual release through the director's Norling Studios for the Buddhist film audience. Within the broader cinema of Bhutan, the film extended Khyentse Norbu's pattern of producing low-budget, festival-route features outside the Bhutanese box-office economy and reinforced his identity as a Vajrayana storyteller more than as a national-cinema figure.^[5]

References

1. Looking for a Lady With Fangs and a Moustache — Wikipedia
2. Film Review: Khyentse Norbu's Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache — Buddhistdoor Global
3. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache global premiere — Morelia International Film Festival
4. Film Review (2019) — Asian Movie Pulse
5. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache — IMDb