Our desires can solely be as expansive as our circumstances. To have ambitions requires the power to think about a approach out of your current. That may be a tough job if a lot of your existence is spent merely making an attempt to make it by way of the day. If, because it occurs for Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh), the younger man on the coronary heart of Zoljargal Purevdash’s wondrous “If Solely I May Hibernate,” it’s a must to fear about caring to your siblings and having the ability to afford coal to warmth the yurt you reside in. Because the movie superbly (and heartbreakingly) traces, typically even simply daring to dream large — not to mention larger — can really feel like a burden.
Like many eldest brothers earlier than him, Ulzii has develop into the de facto man in cost in his family. Together with his father lengthy gone and a mom who continues to be combating a consuming drawback, it’s as much as him to maintain the home — effectively, yurt — afloat. That signifies that at the same time as he research dutifully in school (simply breezing by way of his physics class), he’s tasked with ensuring his siblings are fed, clothed and brought care of (usually promoting his personal possessions to make up for the cash his mom squanders).
That’s changing into more and more more durable to perform, the town life he and his household has grown accustomed to beginning to really feel dearer and tough with every passing day. When his mom decides to take a job again within the countryside and his trainer counsels him to participate in a physics competitors with an opportunity to earn a scholarship, Ulzii is pushed to the restrict.
On paper, “If Solely I May Hibernate” feels like a narrative seen many occasions earlier than: a coming-of-age story the place an overachieving but poverty-stricken teenager has to determine what sort of life he could make for himself as he tries to do proper by his household and good for himself. But Ulzii’s story leaps off the display screen in shocking and welcome methods, enhanced by how Purevdash so firmly establishes an unmistakable sense of place.
Set within the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, this can be a movie concerning the margins, about these neighborhoods and individuals who really feel without end on the fringes. Additionally it is a movie that’s concerning the very chilly that may harden anybody. Because the English title suggests (cribbing because it does a line from the movie about how a lot simpler it’d be to be a bear and skip winter altogether), this can be a drama concerning the grueling forces of winter. Watching it, you possibly can typically really feel the freezing winds hitting your face.Â
However that is no dour, dreary drama. There’s a childlike humorousness that runs all through. Purevdash finds pleasure in small moments, like once we witness the siblings taking part in a sport to determine who’ll ask a retailer proprietor whether or not they have cardboard bins to spare. Certainly, even when issues look significantly dire for Ulzii and his siblings, “If Solely I May Hibernate” doesn’t enable itself to wallow in desolation. There’s a buoyancy to the movie courtesy of Purevdash’s dialogue and, particularly, Johanni Curtet’s ever-pliant rating, which swells and shrinks with putting magnificence.Â
The movie additionally advantages from Uurtsaikh’s managed central efficiency. Given how usually we observe Ulzii draped in wintry garments and simply as chilly a facial features, it’s a marvel Uurtsaikh manages to seize so most of the anxieties that dictate the younger man’s life. There’s an inscrutability to his gaze — what usually leads his trainer, his mom, and even his neighbors — to marvel what actually is happening with him at any given second and query why he received’t brazenly ask for assist.
But Uurtsaikh additionally imbues this all-too-proud, tightly wound teenager with a sort of keen-eyed heat that radiates at any time when he’s allowed to decelerate and luxuriate in what’s round him. A scene the place he and his associates are letting free, rapping alongside to a music with unbridled pleasure is a standout. Ulzii could be a happy-go-lucky child if solely he weren’t saddled with grownup issues that drive him to take jobs like delivering goat carcasses throughout city or illegally logging within the forest for meager wages.
“If Solely I May Hibernate” made historical past final yr as the primary Mongolian movie to play within the official number of the Cannes Movie Pageant, the place it competed within the Un Sure Regard part on the 2023 version. And now, Purevdash’s function directorial debut is representing Mongolia on the Oscars, which speaks to the power and attraction of this intimate drama which finds kernels of hope even inside the oft-bleak portrait it paints. Neither providing a cozied imaginative and prescient of gritted resilience nor a hardened image of arrested (if not outright forgone) ambitions, Ulzii’s story rings true exactly as a result of it refuses to be collapsed right into a feelgood ending.
