User Reviews

Women filmmakers have always had a tough go of things. Making even the more ordinary, usual and surefire hits has been a fairly restrictive practice, to the point that when a woman directs a film like American Psycho, there's a novelty factor involved. Coming from a small New York publisher most pointedly called WOMEN IN FILM (and for all of you that go "WHERE'S THE MEN IN FILM MOVEMENT!?", you're the same people that asked why there wasn't a "White Entertainment Television" channel, and you're an idiot), brings us Ulrike Ottinger's Joan of Arc of Mongolia, the kind of film that would never ever be funded with any notability because it has no desire to engage its viewers in the most usual way.

Joan of Arc of Mongolia, in addition to having a fairly lugubrious, awkward title, is an extremely leisurely film. This is a film so unhurried that the plot strand that begat the film's title isn't even referenced until more than an HOUR into the film, not that it necessarily gets started then. The first of the film's three hours takes place entirely on a train, nominally the Transsibberian Railway, and we get an entire crossection of people, from regional expert Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig), to uptight German schoolmarm Mueller-Vohwinkel (Irm Hermann), from a young French girl open to pretty much anything (Ines Sastre) to singers varying from ostentatious Broadway queen Fanny Ziegfeld (Gillian Scalici) to rotund German cherub Mickey Katz (Peter Kern), as well as the cartoonish, old-school Kalinka sisters, whose primary instrument appears to be the gong.

But they have to leave poor Mickey (as well as an amusingly overzealous Russian soldier) behind as they arrive at his stop, and the rest of the women journey onward on the Transmongolian railway (as fey as Mickey may be, this is girls only), but suddenly (well, "suddenly" comparatively for this film, so, I guess, in a ten-minute sequence), they are held up (by a giant mound of dirt on the tracks) and taken hostage by a Mongolian princess named Ulan Iga (Xu Re Huar) and her hoard for...ill-defined reasons (yes, the film is so mellow in its machinations that it fails to provide reasoning for a forced hostage situation), but the real idea behind it is that it needed to get them here somehow.

From there, the film shifts completely in setting if not in tone, as we journey from the snowy train to the lovely Mongolian landscape for a set of interactions as close to "episodic" as this unfettered narrative unfolds. Where something like Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout matched up members of a modern, "civilized" culture and of members of the less encumbered, more spiritual world to show that they could NOT co-exist, Joan of Arc of Mongolia is here to provide a dissenting opinion. Having one of their numbers be an expert on a subject and a speaker of the Mongolian language is an inspired expositional construct, but it solves an unnecessary problem without any qualms, and other than an amusing scene where a clothesline mistakenly gets the schoolteacher chased by villagers with flaming sticks, they all get along famously.

This geniality is the real charm of the film. There is no manufactured drama, and the only time in the film that does involve an elevated heart rate is done plaintively, almost annoyed that it has to provide an impetus to get from enchanting ramble to graceful stroll. Ulrike Ottinger provides the film with such a gentle touch that it is a joy to behold even as very little is occurring. The film is not deliberate in the way many long, slow films are described. Very little of tangible value occurs during the film, and the film's central quality emanates from it's vagabond heart, it's ability to just sort of wander around, looking at nothing in particular, and keep you interested. The film even provides a splendid little twist in the end, as it's revealed that the Mongolian princess actually lives in the city, and just travels out here for the summertime, making a plea for humanity, against all the naysayers, the cynics and the prejudiced. As a counter to that age old question, "Can't we all just get along?", Joan of Arc of Mongolia provides its two cents: "Sure, why not?" {Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #9 (of 29) of 1989}

Ulrike Ottinger sees things the way nobody else does, and that isn't even her greatest gift. Her greatest gift is her ability to make the spectator see what she sees. It's not like like you, as a viewer, are seeing something you've never seen before, but rather that for the first time you're really paying attention, considering it in a way that you had never previously considered it. I remember watching Ottinger's Aller Jamais Retour for the first time about thirty-five years ago in a symposium on avant-garde feminist film. I can still hear Tabea Blumenschein's red heels clicking across the floor of the airport terminal, see her walking away from the camera instead of toward it, stopping to buy a one-way ticket to Berlin for a booze-fueled blitzkrieg through the city with the likes of Nina Hagen and a homeless woman she picks up along the way.

Still one of the greatest films, feminist or otherwise, that I have ever seen.

This is why I was so thrilled when I stumbled across a streamable version of Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia yesterday on Youtube. Ottinger's work is almost impossible to view and her DVDs equally impossible to find for purchase, so I was really looking forward to this film.

It didn't disappoint.

The story begins among a group of cosmopolitan Europeans on a trip along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The ensemble includes a couple of Russian military officers, female ethnologist Lady Windermere, played by Delphine Seyrig (in what turned out to be her final film role), an uptight German school teacher (Irm Hermann), a young female backpacker, and a Broadway musical star who calls herself Fanny Ziegfeld. There's also a rich young Jewish bon-vivant and Yiddish theater star who gets up to sing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie!" with a trio of female Russian chanteuses, the Kalinka Sisters. The whole thing evokes films like Sternberg's Shanghai Express, which is clearly its intention, but all of the characters, especially the women, are much more than a compendium of stereotypical clichés from movie history. Ottinger caresses these stereotypes, deconstructs them, and in doing so she reveals the complex human beings that reside beneath them.

The western narrative is hijacked - in every sense of the term - when a Mongolian bandit princess and her tribe stop the train and steal away with the female passengers for an extended trip into the exotic landscape of untamed Mongolia. Any notion of a traditional western storytelling is halted as we get lost in this new world, where dialogue gives way to the power of the image. Lady Windermere, both polymath and polyglot who is fluent in Mongolian, convinces the ladies to surrender to the beauty of this singular experience. Essentially, the Mongolians want nothing more than to share their culture with these fellow women, and this is where the full scope of Ottinger's genius is on display. What ensues is a sort of postmodern/feminist take on Montesquieu's Persian Letters in which the women come to realize that to understand themselves, they must understand the other. This is a world where money has no value other than decorative, where broken down motorcycles are pulled through the Taiga by camels, where shamans replace intellectuals and scholars, and where life is every bit as meaningful and rich as it is in the modern and technological world of late-stage capitalism.

It's impossible not to notice how different a story can be when told by female filmmaker intent on not simply repeating the narrative tropes of her male counterparts. The women taken off the train never feel as if they have been "abducted." They do not try to conquer the Mongolian tribe nor do they attempt to escape, which I am sure would be the trajectory of most films centered around a group captive males. The women see this as an opportunity for growth, for adventure, for compassion and understanding.

The film's ending achieves a sort of beautiful and cosmic equilibrium when another train is stopped by the Mongolian bandits so that the European women can return to their lives in the West. Only this time, there's a new passenger. When I watch the bandit princess, now decked out in haute couture on board the Trans-Siberian, seated in an elegant compartment next to Delphine Seyrig, I can't help but think of Lawrence of Arabia turned inside-out.

In any case, see it before it disappears, because it is a masterwork.

"Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia" is a co-production between France and West Germany and French and German are also the languages you will hear in here most often if you decide to give it a watch. This film is from the year when the Berlin Wall fell, so it is already over 25 years old. The writer and director is Ulrike Ottinger and she was in her mid-40s when she made this film, one of her most known works for sure. But in terms of story-telling, I sadly felt there is nothing that really makes a difference here. It is basically the story of a group of women who travel to Mongolia and looking at how long the film is, we find out really little about them I must say. But maybe this also was the filmmaker's intention, that her life before the trip is irrelevant, but that it is all about the trip itself. Anyway, mentioning the duration already, it has no be noted that this live action color film from the late 1980s runs for no less that 2 hours and 45 minutes, which is really massive and takes a very special achievement to make a film that does not drag or at least not too often. This is not such an achievement. It has more than just a few lengths. Story-telling is basically non-existent in here and it feels all about the people, the culture and the clash between cultures (laundry scene for example). But it just isn't (interesting) enough. This is also why I believe this film should not be adored from a feminist perspective. Having a predominantly/exclusively female cast is not enough in my opinion to succeed with regard to this idea. There also needs to be strong acting, writing and directing and it is all very mediocre I think. The only cast member I was familiar with is Irm Hermann here through her work with Fassbinder (who was already long dead by 1989). I am just undecided if she is a good or weak actress, but she sure is very unique. Sadly, her characters are so similar always and she gives it always the same approach with all her mannerisms, so probably not that great of an actress. In addition, the Jacob Sisters have a little cameo and the girl who plays the protégé of the more experienced French traveler is absolutely stunning. But not stunning enough to watch all the scenes without her in this extremely long film. I don't recommend the watch. Thumbs down.