Life can be extraordinary privileged and full of exceptional opportunities when your grandmother is the fabled tastemaker and legendary fashion Editor Diana Vreeland. So when young Nicholas expressed an interest in photography, his doting Grandmother was able to secure him an immediate apprenticeship under the distinguished snapper Irving Penn and then later fixed him up with a job working for none other than Richard Avedon.
After his apartment was burgled and several expensive cameras were taken his Insurance company paid out his claim but rather than re-invest that in more of the same, he used the money to bankroll several years of studying Buddhism. When he eventually decided to become a monk The Dalai Lama himself sent him to a Tibetan refugee settlement just over the Indian border. Vreeland stayed there for several years dedicating himself to studying and also learning the Tibetan language.
After fourteen years away Vreeland started commuting between his Monastery and Manhattan where he ghosted some of the Dalai Lama’s memoirs and also translated the works of his celebrated Buddhist Teacher Khyongla Rato Rinpoche who had retired to live in New Jersey. He also accepted a commission from The Dala Lama to build a new Monastery and Temple in Rato which was all going swimmingly well until the financial crash dried up all the donations from Vreeland’s wealthy philanthropist friends. Undaunted he started photographing again, and using his somewhat limitless list of influential contacts around the world to mount Exhibitions, he sold enough of his work to fund the rest of the building work.
This documentary is by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara who together made the rather wonderful movie ‘Chris and Don: A Love Story’ about the exceptional relationship between Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy. Their very flattering take on Vreeland’s rather worldly life reflects the genuine affection and respect that he is accorded by not just His Holiness but also his celebrity friends like Richard Gere who is a passionate support of Tibetan Buddhism. Some old habits however die hard and when we see Vreeland in his spacious Manhattan apartment dressing in his traditional robes he manages to make them look like a outfit designed by Comme Des Garcon’s Rei Kawakubo rather than the simple attire that poor monks have worn in their spartan isolated lives in the mountainous regions of Tibet for years.
This throughly entertaining film doesn’t attempt to de-mystify Buddhism itself but it does show the importance that The Dalai Lama places on linking it with a contemporary western secular world, and for that end he couldn’t have chosen a better ‘Ambassador’ than the affable and extremely sincere Vreeland.
