Sergei Bodrov makes films about one small figure in a large landscape, and he is at his best when the landscape is real. Mongol (2007) is the reputation; Seventh Son (2014) is what happens when the horses are made of pixels.
Fi1m perspective
Put Sergei Bodrov on real ground and he knows what to do with it. Mongol (2007) sends a boy who will become Genghis Khan across the steppe with real horses and little talking, and the land does most of the work. That is his habit: one person, usually young, set against something far larger, a war, a country, a dynasty, and photographed small inside it. Prisoner of the Mountains (1996) moved a Tolstoy story to the Chechen conflict and made his name abroad by declining to pick a side. Freedom Is Paradise (1989) followed a boy across Kazakhstan with actors and non-actors in the same frame, and the mixing of the two has stayed with him.
He came to directing late and sideways. He trained as a scriptwriter at VGIK, graduating in 1974, and wrote for the satirical magazine Krokodil before directing from the mid-1980s for Kazakhfilm and Mosfilm. The Non-Professionals (1987) was banned at first; glasnost let it out. After Prisoner of the Mountains the films got bigger and the money came from further afield: he co-wrote East/West (1999) for Régis Wargnier, took over Nomad: The Warrior (2005) mid-production, and then made Mongol, shot with the Dutch cinematographer Rogier Stoffers, whom he went looking for because he wanted the best. He usually writes or co-writes what he directs, twice with Arif Aliyev.
What works is the scale when it has people in it. Bodrov can stage a cavalry charge and still keep us looking at one face. Some reviews found Mongol slow in places; a film that lives on riding across open country will be, and that is the price of the method. What does not work is the same scale with nothing underneath. Seventh Son (2014), his first Hollywood studio film, is a chosen-one fantasy built in a computer and talked through from end to end, and we sat through it waiting for a single shot of real weather that never came. The dragons weigh nothing, Jeff Bridges mumbles the rules, and only Julianne Moore seems to have noticed that the material is silly and decided to enjoy it. We were bored, and then puzzled that the man who made horses look like horses could be so indifferent to beasts that look like nothing at all.
He has said of taking that job, "I am a gambler by nature, and I wanted to try my hand at a new genre for me." The bet did not come off. He is still working, with Breathe Easy (2022) his latest credit, and the lesson of the career so far is a plain one: the nearer he is to a horse and the further from a render farm, the better the film.
Biography
Sergei Bodrov is a Russian film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on 28 June 1948 in Khabarovsk, Russian SFSR, USSR.
Bodrov directed Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), Mongol (2007) and Seventh Son (2014). Both Prisoner of the Mountains and Mongol received Academy Award nominations for Best Foreign Language Film. He is also known for writing or co-writing East/West (1999), Sisters (2001) and Kalashnikov (2020).
His son, actor Sergei Bodrov Jr., died in an avalanche in 2002. Bodrov has lived in the United States since the post-Soviet period and is married to film consultant Carolyn Cavallaro.
