By Variety | Created at 2024-11-25 20:17:55 | Updated at 2024-11-27 14:21:21
1 day ago
Our dreams can only be as expansive as our circumstances. To have ambitions requires the ability to imagine a way out of your present. That can be a difficult task if much of your existence is spent merely trying to make it through the day. If, as it happens for Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh), the young man at the heart of Zoljargal Purevdash’s wondrous “If Only I Could Hibernate,” you have to worry about caring for your siblings and being able to afford coal to heat the yurt you reside in. As the film beautifully (and heartbreakingly) traces, sometimes even just daring to dream big — let alone bigger — can feel like a burden.
Like many eldest brothers before him, Ulzii has become the de facto man in charge in his household. With his father long gone and a mother who is still struggling with a drinking problem, it is up to him to keep the house — well, yurt — afloat. That means that even as he studies dutifully at school (easily breezing through his physics class), he’s tasked with making sure his siblings are fed, clothed and taken care of (often selling his own possessions to make up for the money his mother squanders).
That is becoming increasingly harder to accomplish, the city life he and his family has grown accustomed to starting to feel more expensive and difficult with each passing day. When his mother decides to take a job back in the countryside and his teacher counsels him to take part in a physics competition with a chance to earn a scholarship, Ulzii is pushed to the limit.
On paper, “If Only I Could Hibernate” sounds like a story seen many times before: a coming-of-age tale where an overachieving yet poverty-stricken teenager has to figure out what kind of life he can make for himself as he tries to do right by his family and good for himself. Yet Ulzii’s tale leaps off the screen in surprising and welcome ways, enhanced by how Purevdash so firmly establishes an unmistakable sense of place.
Set in the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, this is a film about the margins, about those neighborhoods and people who feel forever at the fringes. It is also a film that is about the very cold that can harden anyone. As the English title suggests (cribbing as it does a line from the film about how much easier it’d be to be a bear and skip winter altogether), this is a drama about the grueling forces of winter. Watching it, you can sometimes feel the freezing winds hitting your face.
But this is no dour, dreary drama. There’s a childlike sense of humor that runs throughout. Purevdash finds joy in small moments, like when we witness the siblings playing a game to decide who’ll ask a store owner whether they have cardboard boxes to spare. Indeed, even when things look particularly dire for Ulzii and his siblings, “If Only I Could Hibernate” doesn’t allow itself to wallow in desolation. There’s a buoyancy to the film courtesy of Purevdash’s dialogue and, in particular, Johanni Curtet’s ever-pliant score, which swells and shrinks with striking beauty.
The film also benefits from Uurtsaikh’s controlled central performance. Given how often we observe Ulzii draped in wintry clothes and just as chilly a facial expression, it’s a wonder Uurtsaikh manages to capture so many of the anxieties that dictate the young man’s life. There’s an inscrutability to his gaze — what often leads his teacher, his mother, and even his neighbors — to wonder what really is going on with him at any given moment and question why he won’t openly ask for help.
Yet Uurtsaikh also imbues this all-too-proud, tightly wound teenager with a kind of keen-eyed warmth that radiates whenever he’s allowed to slow down and enjoy what’s around him. A scene where he and his friends are letting loose, rapping along to a song with unbridled joy is a standout. Ulzii would be a happy-go-lucky kid if only he weren’t saddled with adult concerns that force him to take jobs like delivering goat carcasses across town or illegally logging in the forest for meager wages.
“If Only I Could Hibernate” made history last year as the first Mongolian film to play in the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, where it competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2023 edition. And now, Purevdash’s feature directorial debut is representing Mongolia at the Oscars, which speaks to the strength and charm of this intimate drama which finds kernels of hope even within the oft-bleak portrait it paints. Neither offering a cozied vision of gritted resilience nor a hardened picture of arrested (if not outright forgone) ambitions, Ulzii’s tale rings true precisely because it refuses to be collapsed into a feelgood ending.
