I like Mongolia. It's one of the places that fascinated the hell out of me as a kid. So exotic in the arid, Asian steppe kind of way. Genghis Khan, people! He alone has got somewhere like thirty-million descendants.
And...then there's this movie, called Khadak.
Brief Notes Before I get into the Meat of this Post::
1) Khadak was a German production filmed on location in Mongolia with a Mongolian cast.
2) In the very funny Strong Bad Email "Independent", about the differences between "Independent Films" and "Indie Films", the character Strong Sad makes a joke that in film school he majored in holding on wide shots for too long. I'm betting this German director was the dean of that college.
3) Mongolian language sounds odd. It's not tonal, like Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese. In fact, it sounds as close to a kid's gibberish language as anything I've ever heard. But it's real, so that makes it kind of interesting. But, from this movie, you could hardly tell since there may be fifty words spoken in the first hour of the movie. That may be generous.
The movie starts out on the steppe with a herding lad and his sheep. He's moving them along grazing lines. When he makes it back, he says that he needs to go back out, see, one of the sheep got lost. He lives in a really nice yurt with his mom and her her dad. Grandpa says go back out and get it. After the teenager leaves, mom says was that such a good idea. We viewers (besides wrongly believing that this will actually turn out to be a dialogue using kind of a movie) wonder why she's so overprotective.
Until Bagi, the boy, has a vision of the yurt on fire, and has a seizure right there on the step. If you've got an epileptic kid, maybe sending him out on his own isn't such a good idea. Mom knows this, and she's already out looking for him.
The next few scenes portray his being unconscious from the seizure as him being lost in a forest, while a shamaness screeches and dances in the yurt, tending to his condition, he sees her in his woodsy visions as a helper, trying to get him back to the camp. Eventually he comes to.
That was pretty cool. Artsy and mostly quiet, the scenes unfold like a early seventies convoluted plot, where as an audience member, you're expected to figure certain things out. And the damn Kraut director kept holding on his shots for too long. (Don't get me wrong; the compositions being held upon for too long are beautiful, so there's that.)
Then the government comes through with news of a plague on the animals, and how they need to confiscate all heads of sheep and move all herders into a "city" and become productive workers in a coal mining concern. Then Bagi rescues a beautiful coal thief from sure death, and then they both get arrested.
It must be my powers of summary, because those preceding paragraphs almost make Khadak sound like it was a nearly coherent movie, when that's not the case. There's some performance art later on, and then some other stuff, but it really breaks down near the end. I remember when the camera was in a maneuver that I couldn't comprehend exactly why it was fucking doing it, the combination of the image and the subtitle from the voiceover was so perfect as to demonstrate this movie's essence, that I blurted out laughing, and pretty loudly at that.
I paused it and took a picture, laughing that showing it to someone who hadn't seen the movie was just as enlightenng as having seen it live in the 75th minute of this 100 minute long thing. Here's the picture:
So...there you go. Have fun with that.
When I say the movie broke down near the end, I should some things. There was a fair amount of gin and beer involved, but those things only help with my critical enjoyment of cinema. I seriously watch films, especially when they're perplexing or otherwise incoherent because that's how I enjoy them--trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. This movie's incoherence is widespread.
I went to Wikipedia to get a sense of what contributors to the site said about the movie. They claimed that Bagi and the girl thief start to pull pranks to on the people in the mining town to enliven their lives and bring some mirth to the cadre of former herders. Um, that's not this movie. They try to get some justice, because of course there was no plague, but pranking?
And then, on Khadak's own webpage, they claim the story is about Bagi trying to come to terms with his own destiny to be a shaman. What? In no way did I get that as a sense of what the movie's trying to be about. I mean, Bagi finds and saves the girl from under a huge pile of coal that he would otherwise have no way of knowing about. He said he heard her, knew she was there. Fine. He has visions and epilepsy--or at least what we call it these day--but he's connected to her, and this connection made it possible for him to find her. At least that was my take on that whole scenario. But since there is very little dialogue and the actors are more like statues in a windy valley, there is very little cues to give away the motivations beyond the human sculpture.
And besides, Bagi dies. (I can't imagine anyone being terribly upset about me spoiling it.)
Neither Wikipedia nor their own website have story explanations that resemble what we watched, and neither resemble each other...wow, good job German director.
One thing I learned to appreciate from this German/Mongolian production is that they have very cool names in Mongolia. The main character, teenager Bagi, has for a real first Batzul. Now that's pretty sweet.
Also, they all have such badass coats and hats.
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