A reticent hearse driver reconnects with life in Sengedorj Janchivdorj’s moody road movie
The noir-ish ride that won Mongolian director Sengedorj Janchivdorj and his co-writer Nomuunzul Turmunkh the Grand Prix at Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival can occasionally feel excruciatingly long. However, the slow pacing seems almost deliberate, drawing the audience deeper into the somber, monotonous world of the taciturn titular character. Though he’s barely thirty, Myagmar (Tuvshinbayar Amartuvshin) has spend half of his life in prison. It’s a place he prefers not to talk about – as about everything from his past – but which he ultimately describes as hell. This is more than a common phrase. Within Janchivdorj’s symbolist story the sparse dialogue comes with deeper meaning.
Without family, friends or connections and estranged from the society he returns to, Myagmar acts like the ghost of the person he once was. So it seems fitting that he takes on a job as a hearse driver. The blind coffin maker hiring him is the only one willing to give an ex-convict a chance. The fact that the protagonist is basically dead to society emphasizes Janchivdorj’s metaphorical perception of death. It can apply to status, family ties, repressed trauma and the absence of the feeling of “being alive”. One or several of these aspects concern the individuals Myagmar encounters on his long rides through Ulan Bator.
The most significant of these people is the coffin maker’s enigmatic daughter Saruul (Narantsetseg Ganbaatar). Her depression mirrors his feelings of loss and being lost. With Saruul he overcomes his silence and reveals fragments of his past. Beautiful and tragic, Saruul comes close to a melancholic pixie dream girl. Her main dramatic purpose is to revive Myagmar’s will to live and reinstate his sense of justice. The drab cityscape captured in long, mournful takes, is plagued by corruption and decay. While the poor face draconian punishments, the wealthy go free. If Myagmar wants justice, he must take it in his own hands – and dealing with death doesn’t intimidate him.
Still, the contemplative neo-noir is no simple revenge story. It’s fundamentally concerned with the emotional isolation of its small cast of characters. Each in their own way they are detached from the life around them. Similar to them, the story tends to run in circles, but it always regains its narrative trajectory. The reserved acting lends a hint of mystery to these lonely figures who often stand alone in the colorless, cold concrete structures. The Mongolian capital itself resembles an island in the desert. Psychological alienation becomes an extension of the financial, personal or physical cages entrapping the characters. The cage motive is further expanded by the dog cages on the roof of Myagmar’s childhood home.
His father used to catch stray dogs for a living. A bitter irony, considering the fate of his son who was caught and caged like the animals. Among these dogs the withdrawn protagonist, played by Amartuvshin with almost childlike tenderness, feels more at ease than among humans. A feeling that Janchivdorj’s cinematic ride make utterly relatable. Trough Enkhbayar Enkhtur‘s camera lens, Ulan Bator shines with a gloomy grace. This unique setting surrounded by vast sea of sand seems both mundane and remote. It is this mix of bitterness and beauty which lends this unspectacular, slightly predictable tale a unique charm.
- OT: Чимээгүй хотын жолооч
- Director: Sengedorj Janchivdorj
- Screenplay: Nomuunzul Turmunkh, Sengedorj Janchivdorj
- Year: 2024
- Distribution | Production © Aurae
