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Your support makes all the difference.Mongol is a highly personal and artistic dramatisation of the early life of Genghis Khan. It's shot with marvellous cinematography and an instinctive grasp of a vast landscape that is essential to any epic paean to the great Khan. What is remarkable about Sergei Bodrov's film is its organic, poetic quality, its patient assurance, at once powerful and understated, with tangible hints at an ethereal undertow.
With his intuitive and unfussy directorial grip, Bodrov almost suggests that it is the land itself that is the real power behind the remarkable genius of Temudjin (he became Genghis Khan after founding the Mongol Empire). It is this strongly elemental, minimally expressed take that perhaps best characterises his sympathetic revision of Khan's early life.
The film illustrates how Khan's huge character was built on personal power, a striking natural genius and a firm yet ethereal grace, combined with the conviction and nobility of a supremely calm, yet vigorous spirit. He is shown as impassive and wise, just as the vast horizon of the steppe is all encompassing, a man who transcends the normal conventions of his people by rigorously reducing them to their essential core value and then writing them large across the greater palette of the Mongolian psyche.
Mongol neglects the narrative detail of how Temudjin actually united his people through a code of law, honour and, above all, loyalty. Instead, it focuses on how he established his destiny by withstanding and surviving the extreme trials of his early life. Throughout the film he tries to regain the power and authority that was cruelly stripped from his family clan when he was a small, if precociously imperious, nine-year-old.
The performances are magnificent, and like the film, magnetic. The Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano plays the conqueror, and the Chinese actor Honglei Sun his blood brother, Jamukha, whose narrower understanding of the Mongol way provides the contradiction and explanation for Temudjin's ultimate success.
At just over two hours, the film – spoken in the Mongol language with English subtitles – is slow-paced without ever flagging. In fact, by the end, following the climactic battle scene and the emergence of Mongolian unity, you find yourself eager for the legendary conquests to begin.
Mongol is part one of a proposed trilogy. If the following films can match this stunning achievement, they should be eagerly anticipated.
Steve Crawford, engineer, Lincoln
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