"Your ancestors are dreaming of you, waiting for you, calling you," says the Yoda-like Grandfather (Damchaa Banzar) to Bagi (Batzu Khayankhyarvaa), near the beginning of "Khadak," an ambitious fable set amid herding peoples of the wintry Mongolian steppes.
Bagi can sense lost sheep. He can hear rocks and trees. Strange premonitions cloud his consciousness. A female shaman (Tserendarizav Dashnyam) says Bagi is a mystic. Whether he will accept his calling is the ostensible tension of the film. Grandfather says, if you don't become a shaman, you'll bring misfortune. Talk about parental pressure.
Fortunately "Khadak" does not unfold in that predictable, coming-of-age, face-your-special-powers plot we've seen trotted out in countless superhero films. Rather, this visually mesmerizing but at times frustratingly obscure drama refuses to conform to any conventional roadmap.
Co-directors Peter Brosens (the Mongolia Trilogy "City of the Steppes," "State of Dogs" and "Poets of Mongolia") and Jessica Woodworth ("The Virgin Diaries") let the camera linger motionless over landscapes in long, ponderous takes. Zooms, pans, and dolly shots unfold at a snail's pace, as if measuring the passing of time itself. The few instances of hand-held camera work are almost alarming in comparison to the overall stasis.
For their part, the actors hardly move, speak, or raise their voices. They often appear dwarfed by the severe and treeless landscape. Dramatic events - a motorcycle crash, a coal thief (Tsetsegee Byamba) getting trapped in a railcar - are depicted not in their happening, only as aftermath. A woman is shown crying but we don't know why. Viewers seeking action will become restless.
When Mongolian officials declare a plague has struck the lands, infecting the sheep and cattle, the nomads are separated from their animals and forcibly resettled to a grim, Soviet-era mining town. The second two-thirds of the film abandon us in this jarring modern world. In an intriguing development, Bagi's shamanistic trances are diagnosed as epilepsy. "How poor we are at defending ourselves," Grandfather laments, seeming to speak not only for his people, but for all of civilization's agrarian and paranormal past ruined by industrialization, lost in dead labyrinths of strip-mined mountains.
Then, Bagi wakes up. He connects with an outlaw band of leather-clad Mongolian hipsters and performance artists. "What's happening?" he cries to his fellow inmates at the insane asylum, in a scene reminiscent of Richard Dreyfuss's conspiracy-minded ranting in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." It is, fortunately, the only such "Can't you see what's happening, people?!" scene. Nor does our plucky hero spend the rest of the film getting to the bottom of a government conspiracy.
But what does unfold is perplexing. Daring editing knits together disparate sequences. On earth, Bagi keeps having seizures/visions, while on another plane, he's receiving advice from the shamaness. As Bagi leads a kind of telepathic uprising, the gang marches about, staring into the camera and wielding broken mirrors. The story, once rooted in family and loss, devolves into distant, surrealistic posing, like outtakes from a Mongolian music video. Dialogue borders on faux-spiritual Yoda-speak. We miss Grandfather.
Whether to care, or make sense of "Khadak," largely depends on one's tolerance for vague symbols. Blue scarves tied to branches and weeping tree bark are lovely images. But there's a fine line between lyricism and head-scratching. To paraphrase Yoda, image matters not. Nor does obscuration brilliance make.
Ethan Gilsdorf can be contacted at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.
