“India. Once a faraway and mysterious place of Ghandi and nonviolence. And ancient traditions of spiritual enlightenment. What happens when a young 23-year-old westerner realizes he needs to change, goes there in search of himself, and he finds that The Beatles are there, too? Four of the most loved and famous people in the world, and they’re there to meditate and to write music. They also want to find out who they are on a new and deeper level.”
The Beatles. As a musician I fully appreciate the fact that the band literally changed rock music as much as any other act before or since. The music was truly transcending, which is a great place to start when talking about Meeting The Beatles In India. Just as the Fab Four were nearing the end of their time together, they took six weeks to travel to India, where they met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. At the time TM, or Trancendental Meditation, was gaining a kind of Beatles-like popularity. I remember my mother bringing home a book on TM. It never went anywhere for her, but it did for millions of people. So it’s no surprise that The Lads sought out The Maharishi to see what it was all about. There the band wrote between 30-48 songs. The number is apparently arguable, as you will discover here. And while they were some of the last songs the band would write and record, they stand out as a pinnacle of the band’s career. Shortly thereafter they went their separate ways, as changes began to overtake them as people and as a musical act. Many believe these changes began here in India during that six-week stay. Some of the changes would lead to the inevitable split, while other changes would reshape the landscape of the songs themselves. If you are interested in what happened, this might be a good place to start, but I must confess that I was overall a bit disappointed in the film as a whole. More on that later.
“My name is Paul Saltzman, and this story happened to me in 1968 when I met The Beatles in India at Maharishi’s ashram on the banks on the Ganges River. The Maharishi founded TM (Transcendental Meditation) and The Beatles — Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and John Lennon were there to study with him.”
Enter Paul Saltzman. In 1968 Saltzman was not having a great time with his life, so he ended up taking some rather drastic action. With little money, he took off for India and ended up at the Maharishi’s ashram at the same time as The Beatles. He was doing some photo work to help pay for the trip and ended up taking some iconic pictures of his week there. Many of his photos have been quite famous, but he apparently put them in a drawer and moved on with his life. Fifty years later, it was his daughter who encouraged him to revisit the photos and his time there with The Beatles. The result is this film, which contains some remarkable footage and information about such an historically significant event. I’m just not in love with the presentation.
Several people are interviewed, many associated with that time and that movement. Popular director David Lynch has created a foundation dedicated to the teachings of TM, and he provides some nice balance here. When Saltzman sticks to documentary filmmaking, he delivers. But he suffers some tangents here that make the 80 minutes feel a lot longer than it actually was.
He got Morgan Freeman to narrate the film, but he really only appears for brief moments. It’s Saltzman himself who is the dominant voice here. His telling of the stories sound overtly romanticized here, and I found it to be less about TM and/or The Beatles and more about his own contributions. Of course, there’s no one to contradict him, and it seems more than a little convenient that most of the good personal stuff just so happened to be with George Harrison and John Lennon, convenient because neither of them are alive to contradict him. He was there for about eight days of the six weeks The Beatles stayed. The stories he tells are great, but I don’t find Saltzman to be a reliable narrator. As the man who wrote, directed, and produced the film, he should have realized that it would have served him better to have another voice serve his own point of view. It’s a small thing, but it ate away at me a little bit. It’s how he pronounced the band’s name. He stopped on the T rather harshly before finishing the word. He wants to separate out the word Beat, and I’m not sure why.
The stories are “helped along” by an artist’s graphic novel animations and these I also find to be more of a fictionalization of the events. It’s notable that none of the surviving Beatles contributed to the film, and you have to ask yourself why. Was it money? Or did they not fit the narrative Saltzman is selling here? Beatles fans will also be disappointed that there is little to none of the band’s music here. Again I’m sure it was a rights issue, another reason to get Ringo or Paul to collaborate here. The film is called Meeting The Beatles In India, but I’m still waiting for those introductions.
He does visit Liverpool and the ashram as it looks today. These might have been the most interesting segments. Unfortunately, the ashram is a bit of a tourist trap now, it appears, and most of the buildings where these events took place have been long ago gutted out. Still, this is the kind of authenticity I would have loved to have seen more of.
It’s a shame the film falls flat. This is a historically significant event that Saltzman is covering here, and there is no doubt that his documentation of some of it is quite impressive. There is some good stuff here, but Saltzman makes you work for it, and it just ends up feeling like a long and winding road at times … and not in a good way. The only bonus material is about 50 minutes of cut material, and a couple of those stories were better left on the cutting room floor. A couple of his most fantastic tales are included here. I wish I left the film feeling like I believed it all. Like Mulder, I want to believe. Perhaps it “just needs unfolding”.
