S. Brent Plate

The image of Jesus and the Buddha dancing together in a living room is just one of several images that stick with the viewer of Eve and the Fire Horse, the first feature film by Canadian Julia Kwan. The film expresses all the imagination, all the wild and sometimes zany thoughts, and all the complex social interactions that stand at the heart of religious myths and rituals. To understand this, it is necessary to have the faith of a child.

As every reviewer of the film will express, the young actors Phoebe Kut and Hollie Lo form the foundation for the film’s charm as they whimsically play the eponymous Eve and her older sister Karena Eng. It is a film about children, and about the ways children learn to interpret the world, encouraged and sometimes forced by the powerful forces of family and religion. The great avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage once asked, “How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘green’?” As we grow up, we are taught to discriminate, to divide up some things and lump others together, and ultimately to judge between the factions. Eve suggests that one of these objects we learn to become discriminate about is religion. To the child’s imagination, there is nothing natural about choosing one specific religion over another; religions are not natural but enculturated, and there is no reason why a goldfish can’t be the reincarnation of a dead grandmother who sings opera, why Jesus and Buddha can’t dance together, or why Quan Yin can’t smoke cigarettes and replumb a sink.

As Confucian, Buddhist, Christian, and other images and stories mix together in Eve’s world, the film offers some key insights for interreligious dialogue, first by suggesting that something other than verbal dialogue is necessary in order for religious traditions to begin to make sense of each other. What is needed is imagination, vision (in the physical sense), and play. In fact, the film tends to cast some suspicion over sacred words, and the more Karena reads about Christianity the more dogmatic she becomes (even though a kind of fundamentalist fetish about the physicality of the Bible is brought out when Karena says “if you touch the Bible it can read all your thoughts”). In contrast, Eve’s vision is syn-optic, and even when she tells stories she is mixing and matching traditions, telling Chinese stories to her school mates, making up extra flourishes for other stories, and when she does read directly from the Bible it is the from the erotic poetry of The Song of Solomon, much to her schoolmates’ delight.

Significantly, for Eve’s mother (Vivian Wu) it is only after a miscarriage, the loss of her mother in law, and resulting depression, that she is able to recapture some of the syn-optic vision that her daughter so embodies. She becomes a seeker herself, rethinking and refeeling the various traditions available: she buys Catholic imagery at a religious store, begins to practice Buddhist meditation, watches De Mille’s Ten Commandments, and replenishes the religious altar with a crucifix and Buddha alongside Quan Yin, and other Chinese goddesses. In other words, unfortunately it seems to take tragedy to bring our grown-up religion back into an imaginative realm.

Ultimately, Eve poses a challenge to interreligious dialogue, at least as such dialogue tends to exist today: we will not come to terms with other traditions if we remain wedded to a verbal dialogue about beliefs and theologies. Yet the film offers alternative means for ways in which various, other, religions might ultimately be experienced: dancing, figurines, bodies, fantastic stories, and imagination are all necessary means to bring religious traditions to a similar table, or at least to a spread of tables existing in the same mansion.

Eve and the Fire Horse presents the viewer with religion through the eyes of a child. True religion needs creative rituals and human bodily experiences. Eve allows viewers to find it again.

S. Brent Plate is Contributing Editor to The Revealer and Associate Professor of Religion and the Visual Arts, at Texas Christian University. He recently co-edited The Religion and Film Reader.