2.5/5
Thomas Balmès’s Sing Me a Song has so many compelling elements in this documentary about the ways that technology and the internet has reshaped society, but he is never able to weave all of the film’s disparate threads into something as meaningful or profound as he seems to think it all is. There are some incredible moments of discovery and spontaneity as we observe young monks in a monastery in Bhutan – one of the last places in the world to receive the internet. There are so many compelling images throughout the film – faces of the young monks illuminated solely by the light of cell phones, a panning shot of the same young monks with pellet guns they’ve just purchased as the prepare to play war in violation of every Buddhist principle they’ve been taught, the monks saying their prayers as they play video games or watch YouTube videos on their phones… But there are also moments throughout that feel staged for the cameras and manipulated for the sake of narrative or visual aesthetics, lessening the film’s impact and making it feel less genuine and authentic. The film begins to touch on the urban and rural divide in Bhutan and the way that these young monks are unprepared for the fact that the people they meet online may not be completely honest about who they are in real life. However, there are issues of poverty, power, and privilege that are integral to these issues, but Balmès is unwilling to address them. Instead, he takes a detour into a much less interesting second half, following a mopey teenage boy pining over a girl, broken-hearted and disillusioned. There were so many other, more interesting threads of this narrative to follow, and there is so much that Balmès is consciously leaving out, that the film ends up feeling heavy-handed and overly manipulative in its message about “returning to innocence.”
