Matin Durrani reviews If Only I Could Hibernate – a new Mongolian film about a boy from a hard-up family trying to enter a physics competition
I’ll be honest: the cinema in Bath where I saw the Mongolian-language film If Only I Could Hibernate wasn’t exactly packed to the rafters. There’s probably never going to be a huge audience for a movie about a teenage boy from a hard-up family in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar wanting to enter a physics olympiad.
Written and directed by Zoljargal Purevdash, who apparently excelled at physics herself, the film stars Battsooj Uurtsaikh as Ulzii, who lives with his siblings and mum in a freezing, snow-covered hut in the hilly outskirts of the city. His mum has a drinking problem and goes off to the country with her youngest son to earn some money, leaving Ulzii at home in charge of the rest of the family.
Ulzii’s a typical teenage boy, mucking about with his mates in the snow, getting drunk on cheap spirits, and playing silly games with his other brother and sister. At school, however, he realizes he has a knack for physics and his teacher encourages him to study hard to enter a physics olympiad.
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Ulzii enters a regional heat at a local university, where he starts to see that if he studies hard, physics could open the door to a much brighter future. But lacking money to heat his hut and struggling to keep his home in some kind of order, Ulzii gets sidetracked and quits his studies to earn money out in the forests illegally chopping trees.
There’s a stand-off with his teacher who tracks Ulzii down in the countryside and, without going into spoiler-alert territory, the film takes a few twists and turns as Ulzii tries to decide where his future lies: doing physics or chopping trees. There’s a certain amount of dramatic tension to the story here but, had I not been a physicist, I’m not sure I’d have been that bothered about Ulzii’s fate.
On general release at UK and Irish cinemas from 19 April, If Only I Could Hibernate made its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and I do know that real physics competitions, such as the British Physics Olympiad, are popular among school-age students and their teachers. Perhaps, then, there’s scope for another film-maker to explore such competitions but with more added spice, drama and – dare I say – more “real” physics.
Physics World rating: 3/5.
