"MONGOL" Review and Reflections

It’s estimated that Genghis Khan’s genes are in one out of a hundred people, which would be harder to understand if so many of the world’s people weren’t in Asia. Genghis had four sons. No mention of daughters in the reference I used. This estimate is not based on succession but on DNA evidence. When this proposition hit the media, it was a sensation.

Genghis Khan was demonized by everyone he invaded and dominated, which was just about everyone. Russia and China, for example. But then, in one of those strange reversals, he began to be admired. Everyone loves a winner and some people really like bad boys (me). All the stories about him treated him like a savage. The movie “Mongol,” however, uses an old Mongol-written version of his story to redeem him. This movie is a mythic saga, basically a creation myth, a gospel story. “Westerners” (Europe and America) who try to use Hollywood standards to judge it won’t get far. But American Westerners, the people of the American steppes, will understand and love it.

In particular, the plains Indians will recognize themselves. In fact, the actor who plays Genghis, Tadanobu Asano, (described as a cross between Johnny Depp and Toshiro Mifune) is one-fourth Navajo (his mother’s father) which is probably enough to get him enrolled in the tribe. The crucial part of Genghis’ best friend and toughest rival is played by Honglei Sun, an acclaimed Chinese actor! Asano can stand still, gazing, and project spiritual compassion and bedrock tenacity at the same time. Sun is capable of being entertained by incongruity, sly, and generous all at once. But one of the amazing aspects of this movie is that both actors are lead singers in their own rock bands. They sing together as much as Blackfeet would have! The film itself is saturated with the vibrations of throat singers, symphonic chords, and what one begins to think of as the song of the land itself, wind and sun. I’d like to hear the rock bands.

The real Mongol in the cast is Khulan Choluun who plays Borte, the loved one who powers the story. She is VERY beautiful. I wish I had a photo of the lineup of little girls whom Genghis, then called Temudjin, (all of the children about ten years old) considers for his future wife. It’s already obvious that he will choose Borte, who will claim to have claimed him, but these girls are so charming and individual that he might easily have been distracted.

Part of their presentation is no doubt due to resourceful costumers and make-up artists, using ethnic clothing, ornaments and hairstyles. (The film was nominated for and awarded prizes for many aspects, including a 2007 Oscar nomination for best foreign film.) Mongol dress is basically trousers (they are horseback riders) with long padded coats that have sheepskin collars (something like modern canvas Carthartt’s lined with wool for outdoor workers) and hats cuffed with fox or wolf fur that can be tied down around the face. The cinematography color is often bleached, which is often the effect of high, flat, sun-raked country. Riders seen as silhouettes on a ridge or crossing a long expanse of snow are so striking that with a DVD one stops the action to look.

Sergei Bodroy, a Russian, has Mongol genes himself which may explain why he undertook to write and direct this fabulous film, with it’s long panoramas and unusual locations. A battle filmed in an old avalanche bed strewn with sharp by mossy boulders. A high natural rock prominence with a cleft in it that forms a natural hearth/altar. The boy going through ice and sinking with the camera alongside. You could find those kinds of places not so far from where I am.

Bodroy understands what is humanly important, so the spirit of the God that Temudjin seeks is a wolf, seen from below through sticks, mysteriously separate but inscrutably watching. Bodroy did not expend energy on getting pronunciations exact but on getting right the moral ground of relationship, obligation, dependence, and courage, yet he respects language. (Temudjin teaches his small daughter to say “meat” in Mongol, because it is the most beautiful language.)

This code, protected by God with wolfish relentlessness, is what justifies Temudjin’s transformation into Genghis. He is a devoted family man, he can endure quietly until the proper moment, but when it comes, he strikes. Yet he does not kill his worst enemy who is also his best friend. One of the most penetrating scenes is the struck-down Genghis, lying on the ground half-concious, while his captor -- who is his best friend -- prostrates himself on the ground headed the other way with his face (upside down) inches from Genghis’ face. Always curious and thinking, Jamukha wants to understand why they are enemies and friends at once. The two faces, saturated with blood-red light, confront but cannot mesh. Jamukha understands how to be a Mongol, but he does not understand human bonding.

This film is a good example of how ecology shapes people’s lives, which then supports the emergent code of moral behavior. Mongolia is a harsh and land-locked place where even now the people live like old-time plains Indians, except that in the movie they, like Metis, have carts and cattle as well as sheep. A yurt is like a cabin-shaped tipi. And nowadays there are generators and ATV’s.

This way of life is pastoral and nomadic, with the wolf as the powerful mythological aspect of God, and milk being the communion, which makes the treachery of poisoned milk more awful than a death in battle. The rules of nomads generally mean conventions of peace at oases and generosity to strangers, because everyone knows it benefits the larger whole. So the evil of revenge among the bands over hurt feelings is rejected. (“Mongols do not fight over women.”) These rules (“Mongols do not kill children.”) are illuminated by the plot that gets Tumudjin into one disaster after another. Sometimes we’re not told how he escapes -- the story just jumps -- because this is legend, right at the edge of the supernatural but not quite over it. There are enough bloody war scenes to satisfy fans of Ridley Scott and enough underlying human story to make them think of “Gladiator.”