Last year's Oscar nominees for best foreign language film included a Russian remake of 12 Angry Men, a Polish film about Soviet attrocities during World War 2, an Israeli film about the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, an Austrian movie about Jewish men in a concentration camp who are forced to counterfeit foreign currencies for the Nazis, and Mongol, the story of Genghis Khan's rise to power in Central Asia. Given how much this country loves stories about World War 2, it is perhaps no surprise that the Holocaust drama won.
Mongol certainly deserved to be nominated, but it probably did not deserve to win. This film has a lot going for it and as a production, it is a rather significant achievement. It may be, in fact, the production that is the most impressive part of Mongol. It was written by two Russians, filmed in Kazakhstan, starred Mongolians, and was funded by a multitude of sources including German and Russian non-profit organizations. And for all this, the production values are extremely high: the costumes are well designed, the acting is also more than competent, and the photography is beautiful as they obviously tried very hard to capture the grand sweep of the steppes.
But the story has problems. The writer and director Sergei Bodrov obviously took some dramatic license in telling this story, and there is legitimate ground for complaint for the simple reason that there is a really great story here. In his 2005 book, Jack Weatherford told that story with simplicity and insight. Weatherford managed to recount the most recent research into the early life of Genghis Khan, describe the cultural and political world in which he came to power, and explain why Genghis Khan was so successful militarily. Bodrov's movie forgoes what is, to me at least, an inherently fascinating story in order to tell a somewhat more conventional tale of love and the will to power.
I would have preferred if the movie were more historically accurate and covered more ground. Mongol ends after Temudgin defeats the army of his blood brother Jamukha, and stops with the assumption that we know the rest of the story. But the rest of the story is what really deserves to be told.
Setting aside the ahistorical aspects of the story, it still was not structured very well. In the first half of the movie, the story moves rather quickly and is at best episodic. There is very little explanation of why the scenes fit together or how the characters are able to do what they do. The movie would have benefited from a slower exposition that established the cultural and political framework in which the story exists. Even though the storytelling becomes more coherent in the middle of the film, some of these problems continue until the end.
The problems in the story are perhaps best exemplified by the climatic battle between Temudgin and Jamukha. The conflict between these two characters is a central aspect of the movie as Temudgin refuses to become Jamukha's vassal and actually attracts some of Jamukha's followers by distributing the spoils of battle equally. But to get to this battle scene, Bodrov first creates a one year period in which Temudgin has been defeated and sold as a slave to a Chinese trader. Much of the film, in fact, is told as a flashback during Temudgin's ahistorical imprisonment by a Chinese lord. After escaping from prison, Temudgin manages to gather sufficient followers to challenge Jamukha's preeminence on the steppes, and thus the movie comes to the battle scene. But it doesn't tell the audience anything about how Temudgin gathered these followers. In one scene, he is escaping from prison, and in the next he is at the head of a large army. That is all we are shown, and it simply does not work as a storytelling device. If you are going to tell the story of Genghis Khan's rise to power, it would be wise to show that rise.
Nonetheless, the movie was pretty entertaining. It just wasn't perfect.
