Reel Politique: Movie Review, Mongol
I’ve always wanted to write Roger Ebert and contribute one of those cliches he collects for his little movie glossary column (professional discretion and the fact that he probably already has my ideas in his list have prevented me). I’ve got two or three but the other day I was reminded of one of them while watching Mongol. In this cliche, whenever there is a blood oath drawn, the initiator takes a knife and attacks his hand like Jack the Ripper leaping upon Mary Jane Kelly, leaving a gash as big as the Joker’s grin on his palm, a cut that would take most of us to the ER for 36 stitches. There is a blood oath in Mongol. There is also a kid who falls through the ice of a frozen lake, a shot of a sunset with the sudden appearance of nomads over there at the right hand side of the frame marching into view, and many, many scenes of somber eating rituals. This is also a movie with repetitive stress syndrome. Every time time you tune back in, the Mongol of the title, Temudjin, the later Genghis Khan, is someone’s prisoner, yoked to a pillory for a few years of humiliation, before he escapes again, finds his family, has a ceremonial bowl of yak milk, and then goes off to unite the Mongols. Mongol is a bore, but it has a useful function as an anthology of all the cliches of modern movies, the sort of filmic affect that we seemingly require from movies these days in order for them to feel like movies to us, from the succession of short, unresolved bio-pic like scenes, to the gross and childish battle scenes with the silent flicker images. Then there is the music, god-awful, inappropriate, always running counter to what the scene seems to say or want, and an added dash of chloroform to an already deadly presentation. Naturally, director and writer Sergei Bodrov promises two more. Mongol is currently playing at the Hollywood Theatre.
August 11th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Funny. I agree completely of course (although I might use the term “restful,” in lieu of “bore,” since I awoke at the credits feeling fully refreshed). However, it struck me how much this film seemed to be influenced by the much celebrated films of Sergei Eisenstein (Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, etc.). Apart from a shared ethnicity, these films seem to share a common cinematic heritage as well. Care to comment?
August 12th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I see no heritage stretching back to Eisenstein … only to Ron Howard. If you re-see Ivan the Terrible, as I did recently, the differences are vast and detrimental to director Bodrov’s “style.” Eisenstein’s approach to cinema is precise, careful, slow; narratively, he is as interested if not more so in the court intrigues surrounding Ivan as he is in the battle scenes, which are weirdly both epic and intimate at the same time, but which also bear no brand of the cliche, and which show no continuity with Bodrov’s visual style, which is derivative of so many recent films from the 1990s on. Take for example his heavily-effects-dependent overhead long shots of the killing fields. One need only go back a few years to the Heath Ledger vehicle The Four Feathers to see a much better, more dynamic overhead shot than anything Bodrov comes up with. Bodrov’s battle aftermath moments are depended on the previous example of Kurosawa in Ran and Kagamusha. But the real inspiration for Bodrov’s style is Ron Howard, who in films such as Willow, Far and Away, and The Missing uses the very visual tropes that I listed in the review. It’s rather disturbing to consider that Howard has himself become a “school” of cinema, but one only has thence to realize that this particular sub-Spielberg is only parroting the visual cues he was raised with to see that there is a thread of tenacious mediocrity stitched into the history of the epic film that its practitioners can rely upon without the necessity of thought or forethought.