Mongol

Sergei Bodrov
2007

Award winning director Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol is a research-informed cobbling of the early life and rise to power of the boy/man who would eventually become the infamous Genghis Khan. Genre nuts will be delighted to see Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer, Vital) taking over the role of the famed barbarian king. Filmed in the same windy steppes in which Genghis himself was reared Bodrov strives for an earnest verisimilitude in depicting the life of twelfth century Mongols in a film of Russian production, subtitled from Mongolian, and starring a multiethnic cast.

Ostensibly, the film takes the form of the historical epic with its sweeping, omnipresent landscape and tale of a hero rising from dire circumstances. However, there’s only one large-scale battle, and Temudgin’s (Genghis Khan’s birth name) presumably Machiavellian rise to power is glossed over in a few title cards. What’s left is the many hardships suffered by a thrice enslaved boy, a complicated and competitive relationship with his blood brother Jamukha, and most prominently, a romance between him and wife Borte. Think Braveheart minus all those expensive battle scenes.

Of course, the stereotypical view of Genghis Khan is that of a loin-clothed brute surrounded by a harem of slave wenches, wolfing down a mutton shank and sucking liquor from a wineskin (you remember Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, right?). This is the old legend that Bodrov intends to rectify. There’s a tremendous remoteness in Asano’s performance that’s also in opposition to the classic Khan myth. The hedonistically rampant Id of legend is played as a soft-spoken introspective man who frequently prays, and appears completely unimpressed by material gain.

No attempt has been made to candy-coat Mongol life, in which prepubescent boys pick out their wives for marriage and men raid other tribes when they’re not drunkenly wrestling before the bonfire or heading to a nearby kingdom to unload slaves. Yet the rule of law remains vital and is oft mentioned (though sometimes broken), while the dual bonds of family and society hold together a certifiably bona fide culture. It is in this milieu that Temudgin marries for love in youthful defiance of his father, and secretly breaks Mongol law by going to war over a woman when his wife is apprehended by a rival tribe. There’s definitely a degree of tried and true movie magic in Bodrov depicting Temudgin as the sentimental Casanova in a decidedly unsentimental culture – an exaggeration in favor of provocation.

The majority of the film takes place outdoors, making the foreboding hard-scrabble landscape a perpetual backdrop to the action. The cinematography devoted to the steppes is a bit of a letdown, adequate, but by no mean awe inspiring. Instead the empty land acts as a brilliant stage for the audio in which the pound of every hoof cuts through a nearly oppressive stillness. This amplified sense of sound lends a tremendously visceral nature to the storytelling too, as Temudgin runs from would-be captors his fatigue doesn’t come so much from the weary look on Asano’s face, but from the sound of his ragged footsteps.

Out of the three battle scenes the first two, smaller in scale, feel much more satisfying than the final climax. The use of CGI blood has really come a long way and looks excellent here as Temudgin hacks away at masked assailants from a rival tribe and litters the ground with the corpses of Jamukha’s army in another. A particularly effective device is used in the latter of these two fights in which a time cut brings us to the end of a battle to find the ferocious Temudgin still making mincemeat out of enemies after all his comrades have bought the farm. The final showdown is much less exciting in its predictability with aerial shots full of little CGI ants on each side against a sandy, unconvincing CGI backdrop.

Bodrov does a hell of a job in inventing a new mythos for an established historical figure. Considering the film is supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy on Genghis Khan it will be particularly interesting to see what the director does with this unique take on a man whose empire covered half the globe.