dateline= писал(а):If you`re looking to flee the vexations of modern urban life, try Mongolia as it is revealed in Marie Jaoul de Poncheville`s film ``Molom: A Legend of Mongolia.`` To visit this world of yert-dwelling nomadic herders, shamans and Buddhist monks is almost to step out of time, entering a region where names like Madonna or the two Bills (Gates and Clinton) mean nothing and the rolling prairie once ruled by Genghis Khan evokes stupendous distances of time and space.

Here, the equivalent of haute cuisine is a bowl of steaming goat`s milk. Fun doesn`t get much livelier than a ride on a shaggy-maned pony.

``Molom,`` which opens today at the Quad Cinema, is a religious folk tale narrated by a young boy named Yonden (Yondejunai), who becomes the disciple of Molom (Tseded), a Buddhist shaman. Abandoned on the steppes by his drunken father, a hunter, Yonden is discovered living with wolves by the shaman, who is said to be an eagle that has assumed human form. When Molom appears, the boy instantly recognizes him as his spiritual teacher.

The movie follows the master and his student as they wander over the steppes together, and the shaman teaches Yonden basic survival skills along with spiritual principles. One of the first stops on their journey to the mythical city of Shambala is a pile of stones in which every rock contains a spirit. Later, when Molom tells Yonden that there is a pearl inside him, a spiritual yearning catches fire in the boy, and he is gripped by a wild, uncontrollable urgency to find that pearl.

While lunging toward enlightenment, Yonden undergoes a series of initiations, the most harrowing of which occurs while he is separated from Molom and allows a group of herdsmen to get him drunk. In the ruined city of Karakorum he observes a religious debate among Christian, Muslim, Taoist and Buddhist sages. Eventually, Molom and Yonden arrive in the city of Ulaan Baatar, where the boy is ceremonially handed over to a group of monks for his religious training in a Buddhist monastery.

It`s not easy for a movie to portray the quest for spiritual enlightenment, because the technology of filmmaking necessarily interferes with perceptions that can be fully experienced only firsthand. ``Molom`` nevertheless succeeds better than many such films in casting a glow because of the purity of the performances by its two principals, especially Yondejunai, who plays Yonden.

As you watch the boy become infused with spiritual longing, the young actor appears to be transformed from a mysterious, lost child into a joyous youth who is absolutely sure he has found his life`s path. The radiance he effuses can`t be ascribed purely to acting.