One incidental revelation, or reminder, is how breathlessly and exhaustively the events were reported. Osho with Sheela in Pune one in what look like happier timesīut it is a great story, even if you just turn on the camera and let it roll.
Their own attitude, as far as it can be divined, appears to be a credulous sentimentality. They haven’t given it much of a shape or a perspective - they go from one mind-blowing event and image to the next, and seem to just adopt the point of view of whoever’s talking at the moment, reinforcing it with correspondingly bright or sad or triumphant music (which becomes increasingly intrusive). You sense that after that, it was all they could do to get the story down in reasonably complete and coherent fashion. (Their one previous film is “The Battered Bastards of Baseball,” a documentary about a minor-league team in Portland, Ore., owned by their grandfather.) They’ve done an impressive amount of work, amassing archival film and news clips and tracking down the former followers as well as a number of their foes. The filmmakers who have taken on this bizarre, complicated story are the brothers Chapman and Maclain Way, both too young to remember the 30- to 35-year-old events they’re chronicling.
Interviews with the two women, now in their late 60s, and with Prem Niren, another former Rajneeshee leader, form the backbone of “Wild Wild Country.” It’s a history of the tumultuous years in the early 1980s when the followers bought a 63,000-acre ranch in the high desert of Oregon, built an expansive commune called Rajneeshpuram and went to war with the locals, first in the nearby town of Antelope and then with the entire state. Stork acknowledges that she volunteered to carry out assassinations - twice - but that’s what their good old days entailed. It’s particularly jarring when the petite, gray-haired Ms. They don’t look like leaders of an international religious movement known for Rolls-Royces, or women who went on the run to Europe before serving time for crimes that include arson, wiretapping and attempted murder.
Jane Stork and Ma Anand Sheela, onscreen throughout the six-hour documentary series “Wild Wild Country” on Netflix, look and sound like friends of your grandmother who have dropped by to reminisce about the good old days.
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