Steppe Lively Now |Tadanobu Asano gets down and yurty as Genghis Khan in Mongol.
Look at that boy riding alongside his father as they travel on horseback across the 12th-century Mongolian steppes. To most of us, he would appear to be nothing more than a nine-year-old kid named Temudjin—but if you were a wise old man, one of those wizened, ancient seers who can be found in every clump of yurts, no matter how small, you would recognize him for what he really is: the future Genghis Khan, ruthless warrior, uniter of tribes, and the man destined to rape and pillage his way across most of Asia, spreading his seed so widely that some believe nearly 1 in 200 men are descended from him.
Mongol covers the first stage of Li’l Temudjin’s life, from his boyhood to the 1206 victory that established him as the unquestioned ruler of the united Mongol tribes. Along the way, director Sergei Bodrov proves himself a firm believer in the “man of destiny” theory of history: Temudjin never seems to do anything that hasn’t been foretold by a prophecy or that we haven’t seen him solemnly vow to do years earlier. (This is one of those movies where everything happens three times: the characters announce they’re going to do something, they do it, and then they announce that they’ve done it.) As a result, everything Temudjin does during his rise to power—from slaughtering his enemies to betraying his blood brother Jamukha—comes across as the result not of ruthless ambition but as the inevitable fulfillment of the role fate has decreed for him.
Bodrov’s portrait of Temudjin is at once contrarian yet conventional: instead of the rapacious empire-builder, we see Temudjin first as a helpless boy, orphaned when his father is poisoned by his enemies, and then as a warm-hearted family man, romping in the fields with his son and tastefully making love with his wife Borte, the firelight silhouetting them against the wall of their tent. Well... I suppose that’s one approach to this story—albeit one that removes a lot of what makes Genghis Khan such a fascinatingly alien historical figure.
Do you know who is fascinating, though? Tadanobu Asano, the Japanese star who plays the adult Temudjin, and who has appeared in such a stunningly diverse series of roles over the last 10 years that I’m embarrassed to admit I never associated them with the same actor until now. You mean the guy who played the shy librarian in Last Life in the Universe is the same guy who starred as the Joker-mouthed sadist Kakihara in Ichi the Killer? And had major roles in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumière and Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi in the same year? He’s like a Japanese Viggo Mortensen, but with a serene, almost feminine quality mixed in. Supposedly, Mongol is only the first installment of a planned Genghis Khan trilogy, and perhaps later films will allow Asano to show off his more bloodthirsty Ichi side.
There are some brutal, bloody battle scenes in Mongol, but in a strange way, they make the film seem less realistic. Swords don’t just strike their opponents’ bodies in this movie; every hit produces thick, red gouts of slow-motion CGI blood. It’s the same effect that Takeshi Kitano used in Zatoichi, where it gave the swordfights a certain heightened, mythic quality; here, combined with the Saving Private Ryan skip-frame photography, it merely seems vulgar and anachronistic. (The most ridiculous moment comes when Temudjin somehow throws a spear the size of a telephone pole through an opponent’s chest, impaling him on a tree a few feet behind him. When did Genghis Khan get as strong as Hellboy?)
There’s no denying Mongol looks great—the production values are impeccable, and if you like watching people ride horses across widescreen sunsets, boy, are you in for a treat! It was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year for Best Foreign Language Film, and it’s the kind of square, ponderous, every-dollar-is-up-there-on-the-screen epic that I imagine appeals to the same Oscar voters who gave Best Picture to movies like Braveheart and Gladiator.
When it comes to conquering the world, Hollywood has far surpassed Genghis Khan: even as far away as Kazakhstan, they’ve learned to obey its laws.
