Öndög
Өндөг | 恐龙蛋
Mongolia/China, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 96 mins.
Director: Wang Quan’an 王全安.
Rating: 6/10.
The photography is the star of the show in this existential tale set in the Mongolian grasslands.
STORY
Somewhere in the grasslands, Mongolia, the present day, late autumn. One night a police patrol discovers the body of a naked woman. When day breaks, a lone herdswoman, nicknamed Dinosaur (Enkhtaivan Dulamjav), appears on her Bactrian camel and scares off a female wolf who is on the prowl for food; she then rides away. The police chief (Arild Gangtemuer) tells his young assistant (Batmunkh Norovsambuu) to stay at the crime scene and protect the body against being eaten by wolves. He says he’ll tell the herdswoman to come over to help him. At first she refuses but, as she’s the only the person within 100 kilometres, the police order her. She tells the young policeman she’ll bring him some food. She lives alone, so gets a childhood friend, Orgil (D. Aorigeletu), to help her kill a sheep and finally brings the young policeman some food that night. They eat and drink around a fire; he says he’s never had a girlfriend and she gives him tips on how to attract one. They end up having sex. Just as the young policeman climaxes, the herdswoman takes her rifle and shoots the roaming female wolf dead. Next day the police arrive to collect the bodies of the woman and the wolf; they have arrested a suspect and think the killing was a crime of passion. At the mortuary the woman’s body undergoes a post mortem to determine cause of death. Then, sometime later, the herdswoman discovers she’s pregnant.
REVIEW
A solitary herdswoman, her childhood friend, a young policeman, a female corpse and the vast Mongolian grasslands interact in sometimes interesting, sometimes predictable ways in Öndög Өндөг | 恐龙蛋, a land-and-sky existential drama with an all-Mongolian cast but made (and largely financed) by mainland Chinese. It’s the first film by writer-director Wang Quan’an 王全安 in seven years – following the commercial flop (RMB142 million) of rural saga White Deer Plain 白鹿原 (2012), his biggest and most ambitious movie to date – and it’s almost as if Wang, now 53, has gone back to first basics in a renewed search for filmic identity. He’s kind of been in this metaphysical territory before – in the female-centred peasant dramas The Story of Ermei 惊蛰 (2004) and Tuya’s Marriage 图雅的婚事 (2006), the latter set in China’s Inner Mongolia province – but never in such a rarified, almost abstract way. At the film’s Berlin festival premiere, Wang stated he didn’t even have a script two weeks before shooting, just two basic concepts (a cop, a corpse), and too often this shows in the finished product, whose striking photography can’t hide the fact that Öndög is basically an unresolved jumble of ideas.
The set-up is intriguing enough. The naked body of a young woman is discovered by the police at night in the middle of nowhere, and a virginal young cop left to guard the corpse against wolves. During the day a herdswoman – the only human for 100 kilometres – arrives on her Bactrian camel and scares off a predatory female wolf before riding away. That night she eventually brings the frozen young cop some food and, after plenty of alcohol, the inevitable happens. Next day the police arrive with a suspect and cart off the corpse. So much for the first half of the film – part whodunit, part ethnic documentary, part sardonic comedy, part meditation on the timelessness of grasslands life.
It’s from this point on, however, that Öndög (Mongolian for “egg”) is shown wanting, with no clear sense of direction to repay the audience’s curiosity (and patience) and a growing feeling, as sequences get longer and emptier, that more is definitely becoming less. The revelation that the herdswoman finds she’s pregnant fuels most of the second half, but it’s never built into any kind of ensemble between her and the two kind-of-men-in-her-life – a childhood friend she’s always kept at arm’s length and the young policeman whose virginity she relieved. This, despite the fact that the theme of a woman and two or more men has been a recurrent one in Wang’s previous films, and seemingly tailor-made for here.
Instead, the script just tosses various ideas around: a solitary woman, who’s so far bucked the norms of marriage and family, now facing a crossroads; much talk about fossilised dinosaurs’ eggs that, in locals’ minds, link the people with the extinct reptiles; plus various day-to-day ethnographic images – all, seemingly, weaving a tapestry of life, sex and death in the timeless grasslands. With a more solid structure, it could have played out as such; but, to the last, Öndög promises to be something it never becomes. Nor – despite Wang’s obvious awe for the setting and its people – does the film deliver at the other end of the scale as a purely abstract meditation or love letter. A crafted score would have been necessary for that – but musical underscoring has never been a major interest of Wang and its absence here is more missed than ever.
With most of the film framed in long or medium shots, with very few close-ups, and performances by the non-professional cast being decidedly minimalist, the star of the show is actually young French d.p. Aymerick Pilarski, taking over the reins from Wang’s regular cinematographer, German Lutz Reitemeier, who shot five of his previous six features. Based in Beijing for almost a decade working on various movies as camera staff, Pilarski has recently clocked up d.p. credits on French co-production Soul Inn 花花世界灵魂客 (2017) and the so-far-unreleased period action drama Invisible Tattoo 纹身 (2019), starring Zhao Wenzhuo 赵文卓. But it’s his work on Öndög that’s career-making, from the dawn/dusk widescreen tapestries, with the sky taking up most of the frame, to the obvious improvisation in sequences like the nighttime birth of a calf and the aftermath in the herdswoman’s yurt, apparently shot in a single take.
The Mongolian grasslands are as spectacular (and over-used) a setting for existential dramas as the Russian steppe, Hungarian puszta or Argentinian pampas, and a gift to any d.p.; but Pilarski makes it his own with an obvious versatility and a gritty edge that fits the story’s underbelly. The visceral power of the film’s most striking sequence – a fire/camel-side copulation that ends up giving a new meaning to the phrase coitus interruptus – is as much due to Pilarski’s lighting and camerawork as to Wang’s offbeat concept and technical trickery. Nothing in Öndög‘s second half comes close to that dramatic high point – though, as the film simply trails away at the end, there’s a feeling that, if Wang had spent more time digesting his ideas into a real script, there could have been.
For the record, the copy shown in the Berlinale had all-English credits.
CREDITS
Presented by New Theatre Union (MN), Landi Studios (CN), Mogo Film Labs (CN), October Harvest Culture Media (CN). Produced by New Theatre Union (MN).
Script: Wang Quan’an. Photography: Aymerick Pilarski. Editing: Wang Quan’an, Yang Wenjian. Music: uncredited. Art direction: Bater. Costumes: Wurichaihu. Sound: Wang Xuliang, Wang Changrui.
Cast: Enkhtaivan Dulamjav (herdswoman/Dinosaur), D. Aorigeletu (Orgil, herdsman), Batmunkh Norovsambuu (young policeman), Arild Gangtemuer (police chief).
Premiere: Berlin Film Festival (Competition), 8 Feb 2019.
Release: Mongolia, tba; China, tba.