Starring Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev. In Kazakh, Mongolian, and Mandarin, with English subtitles. Unrated.

Plays Friday to Sunday, January 16 to 18, at the Pacific Cinémathíƒ ¨que

An imperial leader of limited imagination cannot grasp the real dangers quietly creeping up on him because he is so fixated on imaginary threats from Baghdad. Anyone rash enough to press the truth upon him is met with banishment or worse. The George W. Bush Story? No. The Fall of Otrar, an epic on the scale of Akira Kurosawa's Ran, was a last artistic gasp of the Soviet empire, and also a potent blow against it just when it was already on the ropes.

Released in 1991 but unavailable until last year, this genuinely sweeping effort--almost three hours, and none of it wasted--was directed by Ardak Amirkulov from a script by the better-known Aleksei German and Svetlana Karmalita (who later wrote the post-Soviet Khrustalyov, My Car! with German). It moves smoothly, if sometimes cryptically--thanks to overly enigmatic subtitles and constantly shifting alliances--from huge battle sequences of brutal intensity to intimate interior dialogues between despots and followers, as well as ordinary mortals, with horses flying across frozen steppes for poetic measure. The Tuvan throat singing is a nice touch, too, and helps make up for some of the awful dubbing.

The common thread wending through several years of siege and respite in the early 13th century is the resourceful Ozhu. He's played unforgettably by Dokhdurbek Kydyralyev, who has the feline grace of Toshiro Mifune in his heyday, with a touch of Mel Gibson at his most masochistic. (And we do get to see his butt quite a few times.)

Analogous to a wandering samurai, this fellow is a regal Khan who has pledged to defend the rulers of his Kipchak kingdom, in the land that would later become Kazakhstan. Ozhu has been away for seven years, studying the steady westward advances of Genghis Khan and his increasingly multicultural hordes. But the oddly birthmarked Kipchak leader, Khairkhan (Tungyshbai Dzhamankulov), doesn't want to hear about it. When the Kipchak guards get hold of our returning hero, they treat him more like an ex-Khan, strapping him to a crucifix in the "merry tower". (And, horror fans, there's plenty more laughter like this to come.)

Ozhu persists, but Khairkhan and the Persian Shah he answers to are far more concerned with imposing their slightly different vision of Islam on Baghdad, and the next thing you know--well, Mongols will be Mongols. Good thing the world has totally smartened up since then, eh?