The Man Who Would Be Khan
Mongol
The New York Sun, June 6, 2008
On vacation some years ago in a post-communist Mongolia now free to venerate its most famous son, I asked one of the locals if he thought Genghis Khan, the founder and posthumously declared emperor of what became the largest contiguous empire in history, had been, well, just a touch brutal. "Oh, yes," came the reply, "but he was provoked."
That's pretty much the spirit in which the Russian director Sergei Bodrov has made "Mongol," a lavish, highly praised (it was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year) movie that opens in the city today and depicts the rise of Genghis as a well-deserved triumph over adversity. To be fair, this is also the way this tale is told in "The Secret History of the Mongols," a 13th-century Mongolian text that, despite its misty mix of myth, history, and propaganda, is probably the most accurate account of the khan's early years.
It's from there that Mr. Bodrov has taken the core of his story about the young man, known as Temudjin, who will be khan. The film begins in his childhood, and as childhoods go, it's rough, a blend of the bleaker elements of "Oliver Twist," "Harry Potter," and the princes in the tower, transported to Central Asia and reimagined by the creators of "A Man Called Horse." The 9-year-old Temudjin (Odnyam Odsuren) witnesses the murder of his father, is robbed of his right to succeed to the chieftaincy of his clan, and, finally, is forced to escape into the wilderness. As the years pass, ordeals pile on. Even Temudjin's much-delayed honeymoon is transformed into a nightmare when marauding members of an enemy tribe kidnap his gorgeous, free-spirited bride, Börte (Khulan Chuluun).
That ought to be quite enough misery for anyone, but Mr. Bodrov, a true Slav, adds more. In sequences that owe nothing to "The Secret History of the Mongols" and everything to the need to provide a vaguely respectable rationalization for one of Genghis's later massacres, Temudjin is handed over to the rulers of the neighboring Tangut kingdom. They treat him very nastily indeed. At this point, astute cinemagoers will know that the Tanguts are toast. And so they turned out to be, although in "Mongol" this barely merits a footnote. The Tanguts were, in fact, annihilated. Their once-advanced civilization was reduced to desolation, archeological fragments, and something less than a memory. Their only crime was to have been in the way.
Not that that appears to worry Mr. Bodrov much. Once best-known for the lyrical, haunting "Prisoner of the Mountains," an adaptation of a Tolstoy novella updated to reflect today's Chechen conflict, the director has abandoned his earlier, subtle take on the cost of war in favor of something cruder. His last film, "Nomad," was a cack-handed Kazakh "Braveheart," a laughably acted, lamentably written slab of nationalist kitsch redeemed only by its deft use of a landscape so lovely, so strange, and so huge that John Ford should have been there to film it.
That same terrain, or somewhere very much like it, adds an equally hallucinatory grandeur to "Mongol." What's more, like "Nomad," the new film shows clear traces of "Eurasianism," a distinctively Russian, distinctly shaky interpretation of history sometimes deployed to explain why Western-style democracy could never work in Russia. Whatever the similarities between the two movies, however, "Mongol" is a significantly better film. This time around, the screenplay is refreshingly adequate (despite sporadic slips into portentousness, narrative muddle, and shamanistic hocus-pocus).
The acting is much more than that. Casting a Japanese actor to play the 20-something Temudjin may irritate some purists, but at least Tadanobu Asano is considerably more "authentic" than his most notorious predecessor, John Wayne, who played the role in "The Conqueror," Howard Hughes's bizarre, irradiated (it's a long story), and very approximate take on the same tale. Mr. Asano is also far more convincing: His compelling, carefully calibrated performance should quiet most doubts. His Temudjin is watchful, stoic, and self-contained, his terrifying, patient stillness that of the predator waiting his turn, even under the most horrific duress.
Mr. Asano is beautifully counterbalanced by the Chinese actor Honglei Sun (most of the rest of the cast here is, tactfully, Mongolian) as the ebullient Jamukha, Temudjin's rescuer, blood brother, ally, and, ultimately, adversary. Mr. Sun delivers an unexpectedly touching performance as a man driven by custom, power politics, and fate into a savage conflict that he would have given almost anything to avoid.
This sense of destiny galloping onward and ominously at an ever-increasing pace lends the film much of its force, which is only amplified by our knowledge of where the saga will lead. Those first skirmishes on the vast grasslands, wild lightning horseback clashes conducted at a speed that would shame the Comanche, are precursors of a razzia that will, eventually, rage across two continents with a brutality that is breathtaking even by the demanding standards of the 13th century. But as those quick clashes evolve into brilliantly filmed, dizzyingly choreographed massed battles, it's impossible not to wonder if the spectacle is not a dazzling, distracting camouflage deliberately designed by Mr. Bodrov to mask the horrors he purports to show — horrors that foreshadow the hecatombs to come.
"Mongol" concludes with Temudjin imposing a bloody unity on his perpetually feuding nation — an objective, justification, and excuse typical of strongmen throughout the ages that have, in Mr. Bodrov, clearly found both a willing listener and a talented apologist. The director is now proposing to turn his attention to Temudjin/Genghis's subsequent wars of conquest. If "Mongol," the first of a planned trilogy, is anything to go by, the remaining two films will be wonderful to watch and troubling to ponder: Atrocities are still atrocities, however much time has passed.