# Genghis Blues (1999)

### reviewed by
Curtis Edmonds

Genghis Blues: The Best Movie You Haven't Seen

It was the Year of our Lord 1989 and International Communism in Europe came crashing down with a thump. Writer P.J. O'Rourke was in Berlin, setting aside his usual cynical mien to exult. "The West won the Cold War," he shouted. "The privileges of liberty and the rights of the individual went out and kicked butt." O'Rourke saw an impoverished East German border guard stretching out a skinny hand through the ruins of the Berlin Wall, begging some raucous students for a souvenir piece, and he got all choked up. "The tears of victory rolled down my face." he wrote, "and the snot of victory did too, because it was an awfully cold day."

Where O'Rourke was standing, he could still hear the glorious sound of power tools tearing the Berlin Wall to pieces. He couldn't have known that, over ten years later, the triumphant echoes of that sound would still ring out across the world. And he would never, ever, have dreamed that the echoes of freedom would stretch to a little Soviet mini-republic called Tuva, half a world away from anywhere, and that they can still be heard in the harmonious echoes of a traditional form of music called throat singing.

Tuva is a little country on the map, wedged in between Siberia and Mongolia. We're told it's about the size of North Dakota, and it looks to be on the same latitude as Winnipeg. Its people are nomadic sheepherders with a religion that's part shamanistic and part Tibetan Buddhist. Just as the Tibetans have been squashed by the Chinese Communists over the years, the Soviets oppressed the Tuvans, forbidding their clothing styles and culture and even their language. When the Soviets folded up their yurts and headed back to Moscow, the Tuvans were free once more to talk and think and dress as they pleased, and pass on their unique culture to their children.

But the recovery of freedom in Tuva is not the whole story of Genghis Blues.

For, you see, Tuva had been free once before, back in the mid-1920s when the Soviets were too busy fighting the Russian Civil War to pay attention to Tuva. The first free Tuvan state might have passed into total obscurity had not they issued a set of odd-looking stamps. A young man named Richard Feynman collected these stamps, and grew up to be a famously iconoclastic Nobel Prize winning physicist. He developed an interest in all things Tuvan (after all, he said, any place with a capital named "Kyzyl" had to be interesting), but was denied permission to visit Tuva by the Soviets. His friends maintained the "Friends of Tuva" association and were eventually successful in bringing some Tuvan musicians to play in San Francisco in the early 1990's.

But the unlikely relationship between Americans and Tuvans is not the whole story of Genghis Blues.

No, the real story is even more unlikely. For at the Tuvans' concert in San Francisco, a member of the audience met up with them backstage and began throat singing a Tuvan ballad in the ancient style. Paul Pena, a blues musician who is blind, heard a Tuvan throat singing performance on a shortwave radio some years before. Fascinated, he figured out the Tuvan musical style of throat singing, which involves using the lungs like bagpipes to create this weird harmonic sound. Well, the head of the Tuvan delegation immediately invited Pena to the Tuvan throat singing competition and cultural symposium in 1995. Pena left San Francisco and traveled to Tuva, accompanied by a team of kamikaze filmmakers and a local radio DJ.

This is the story of Genghis Blues -- the story of the triumphal visit of Paul Pena to Tuva -- and you won't see a better movie this year.

Now look, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I've lost my mind. This can't be the best movie of the year. It's a documentary, for crying out loud. It's got subtitles. It's about some weird kind of music that you have to hear to even believe.

I know. It sounds incredibly goofy. It sounds like the sort of movie that your friend the film buff tells you to see that's only playing at a tiny theater on the other side of town and has Ralph Fiennes wearing something other than a Nazi uniform or Harvey Keitel not wearing anything.

But trust me. This is a great movie. Let me tell you what happened to me. There's a scene, early on, where Pena visits a school in Tuva. All these little kids are lined up, and they're demonstrating throat singing. After they're finished, they come up to Pena -- who's this great big shaggy bear of a guy -- and hug him and welcome him to their country. And one of these kids is wearing a San Francisco Giants cap, and when I saw that, I started grinning and didn't stop.

It gets better. (Not right away, there's a sheep slaughtering scene in between, but it does.) There are two scenes in this movie where Pena gets on stage and performs... and... well, I'm never going to be a throat singing fan, and if this stuff ever hits the airwaves on anything other than NPR I'll be shocked. But that doesn't matter, not one little bit, because these scenes are electric. Pena develops this incredible rapport with the audience that completely transcends the music, East-West relationships, anything you care to name.

There are those who say that 1999 was a great year for movies, and a lot of them point to what they call "movie magic". From a pure special effects angle, they have a point, and movies like The Matrix and the new Star Wars movie show a lot of technical wizardry. But the real magic of movies is not what's on screen but what's in the heart. Genghis Blues is the most magical movie of the year. It tells an extraordinary story about great characters in a faraway land, and it does it with the kind of open, exuberant spirit you don't see in movies anymore. Genghis Blues reminds us that movies, like children and music, have the power to stir the most cynical bean-bag of a heart. Yes, and to make it dance.

    --
    Curtis D. Edmonds
    blueduck@hsbr.org

Movie Reviews: http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Curtis+Edmonds http://www.epinions.com/user-curtisedmonds

"Good fences don't necessarily make good neighbors, but high fences help." -- Hank Hill, WD-40 For The Soul

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