Khadak

The New York Sun, October 12, 2007

There once was a glorious, splendid, self-confident epoch, back in the reign of the blessed Eisenhower, when a director from the West could shoot a film about remote, mysterious Mongolia with minimal authenticity, fearless inaccuracy, and cultural crassness so epic that it could feature John Wayne as the young Genghis, Susan Hayward as Bortai, a haughty Tatar princess, and the irradiated Utah desert as the land of the khans. "The Conqueror" (produced, appropriately enough, by remote, mysterious Howard Hughes) may have been a critical and box office disaster in 1955, but there is something about its trashy exuberance, ludicrous script, and unashamed sexism that make it a wild, if naughty, treat. Who could forget those seductive, sinuous dancing girls and the touch of Vegas they brought to that distant, turbulent steppe? Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth, the directors of "Khadak," that's who.

If "The Conqueror" is like one of those alluring, amazing, artificial, Technicolor desserts that used to bring a chemical grace to the dinner tables of Ike's America, so "Khadak," which arrives at Cinema Village today, is fat-free and eat-your-greens — appropriate fare for our grimly sensitive and relentlessly sanctimonious era. Be warned that it is, ominously and accurately, also billed as a "magical-realist fable," a description so reliably predictive of imminent tedium that both the Khan and the Duke would have trembled at the thought of the horrors to come.

The movie's confused and fragmentary narrative revolves around Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa), a young nomad herdsman. Glum, taciturn, and subject to fits, poor Bagi gradually discovers that his seizures are triggered neither by epilepsy nor irritation at this film's stumbling screenplay. Rather, they signify that he is a shaman. In "The Conqueror," that would have earned him a weird clown hat and a prominent role at court. As, however, this particular shaman has found himself trapped in "Khadak," he has to make do with time travel, the companionship of the beautiful Zolzaya (Tsetsegee Byamba), and the opportunity to uncover a possible government conspiracy to trick his fellow nomads into abandoning their traditional lifestyle in favor of jobs with a mining company.

If the storyline in "Khadak" is unconvincing, much of its cinematography is anything but. For all its faults, this is undoubtedly a visually striking movie, at times astonishingly so. Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth (both of whom have backgrounds in documentary film) have been working in Mongolia for a number of years and it shows. The stark, vivid, and contradictory imagery of the Mongolia portrayed in "Khadak" bears little resemblance to the kitschy, made-for-export spectacle presented by the country's best-known director, Byambasuren Davaa. Ms. Davaa's movies ("The Story of the Weeping Camel," "The Cave of the Yellow Dog") may be wonderful to look at, but their underlying aesthetic, picture book prettiness, and superficial samplings of third-world exotica owe more to "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" than the realities of life in Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator) or, for that matter, the Gobi.

The beauties of "Khadak" are something more subtle, complex, and disturbing. To be sure, there are the inevitably lovely shots of windswept wilderness and lonely ger, but these are complemented by evocative footage of industrial machinery and the haunting remnants of an old Soviet settlement. Taken together, they make a compelling backdrop both to this movie and, frustratingly, the far better film it might have become.

Something similar could be said of the cast in "Khadak." For the most part, they do their best with the little they've been given (we'll draw a veil over the histrionics of Tserendarizav Dashnyam, an actress who puts the ham in shaman), but, in the end, there's just not enough material for them to work with. It's hard to avoid the impression that Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth viewed their ac tors as little more than additional backdrop, puppets to be manipulated and posed rather than fully realized characters with inner lives all their own.

One reason for this may be these filmmakers' inexperience with fiction, but a more likely explanation is that they were more concerned with the content of their message than its delivery. And that message is routine environmentalist agitprop overlaid with the multiculturalist piety that is, in reality, a form of profoundly insulting condescension. Mongolia is a hideously poor country trying to escape both ancient backwardness and the cruel pastiche of modernization that was communist rule. To deny that this process is difficult, occasionally brutal, and often exploitative would be absurd. Even so, to suggest, as this film appears to, that the solution can be found with the help of eco-babble, ancestral superstition, and premodern agriculture is even worse. It's a point of view that reveals more about the self-loathing of certain sections of the Western intelligentsia than any real understanding of the needs and aspirations of the Mongolian people.

"Khadak" is therefore best seen as an example of an updated form of cultural imperialism, one made all the more egregious by its pretense to be just the opposite. Under the circumstances, why not stick with the honest dishonesty of the original? In Mongolia's case, I'll opt for "The Conqueror" and the pleasures of Susan Hayward's high camp Bortai, an alabaster-skinned, red-haired daughter of Tatary born in Brooklyn, filmed in Utah, and financed by Howard Hughes, that fantasist, fabulist, and jet-age shaman.