Astonishingly, the name and the person of Genghis Khan in Sergei Bodrov's"Mongol",a great, Shakespearean drama about this seminal figure in history, don't appear until the very end of the two-hour epic. Instead, we see Temudjin, the man yet to become (posthumously) Khagan (emperor) of what was to be for several centuries the largest contiguous empire in history.

 

Whether Bodrov completes the contemplated two additional chapters of the story or not, "Mongol" stands on its own as a masterpiece. Contradicting the Western (and Russian) image of Genghis as the monstrous conqueror, Bodrov's work is influenced by Lev Gumilev's "The Legend of the Black Arrow" and is based on "The Secret History of the Mongols," the 13th century Mongolian account, unknown until its re-emergence in China 700 years later. For a director, who learned in school only about the horrors of Russia's 200-year subjugation by the Mongols, taking a "larger view" is a remarkable act.

 

Unlike Omar Sharif in the 1965 Henry Levin "Genghis Khan" or Takashi Sorimachi in Shinichiro Sawai's disappointing 2007 "To the Ends of the Earth and Sea," Tadanobu Asano in Bodrov's film is strictly Temudjin, not the great Khan. He lived from 1162 to 1227, and "Mongol" covers the years between 1171 and the beginning of the unification of Mongolian tribes around the turn of the century...