A Fraught Coming of Age in Ulaanbaatar, in “Snow in September”

Coming-of-age stories are often not happy ones, and first experiences can set in motion forces that course through a lifetime. A quietly traumatic initiation into adulthood is the subject of the short film “Snow in September,” in which the Mongolian director Lkhagvadulam Purev-Ochir examines how a confusing encounter with an older woman upends one teen-age boy’s relationships and changes the way he moves through the world.

The boy is Davka, whom we first meet as he walks home from school with Anuka, a girl who lives in the same apartment building. The two have the coltish rapport of kids who grew up together but now have an unacknowledged sexual tension buzzing between them. They goad each other with incursions into the risqué, but when they get home their conversation ends with nothing more than a giggle, and they part ways.

Home alone in his apartment after school, Davka is eating snacks and playing video games when a woman he doesn’t know comes to the door. She asks to use the phone, saying she has locked herself out of her apartment. He is hesitant, but she wheedles her way inside, calling him “little brother,” and indicates that she knows his mother. From there, the woman slowly pushes deeper and deeper into the apartment. By the time Davka finishes making her tea (as Mongolians customarily do for guests), the woman is in his bedroom. She sits on his bed and beckons him to sit on a chair across from her, so the two are perched knee to knee.

The apartment building where the film was shot contributes much of the film’s atmosphere. It’s a dilapidated Soviet-era structure in Ulaanbaatar, and it sits just across from the identical building where Purev-Ochir grew up. Purev-Ochir told me that, though this type of building is very familiar to anybody from Ulaanbaatar, such spaces aren’t typically the focus of Mongolian films and shows, which tend to be set in the grandeur of the countryside or the slick modernity of newer parts of the city. But, to her, it was important to set the story in this part of her home town.

“This identity of the city is very important for me to reveal—not just to foreigners but to reveal to ourselves as well,” she said. “You know, it’s about trying to understand ourselves—who we are, and our history, and where we are, and how we come from one place to another. And I think it’s important that we see ourselves onscreen in a real way.”

The setting is also suited to the everydayness of the story told in this film. We see Davka at home and at school, in a series of days that seem unremarkable aside from the interior turmoil he is experiencing. The settings and actors look like ordinary places and people. However, the colors, the quality of light, and the regimented tightness of the building’s rooms and stairwells simultaneously convey a feeling of isolation and an impression that Davka is navigating something much bigger than himself.

The film doesn’t show the entirety of Davka’s interaction with the woman, so viewers must piece together what happened and how to think of it—is the camera cutting away from an emotional manipulation? A physical predation? But Purev-Ochir said it’s very clear in her own mind what happened between them. “The scene is actually asking us to deal with our own biases,” she said. “If the genders were reversed—a teen-age girl and a forty-plus man—I don’t think people would be questioning what happened.” The film was inspired by a man she knew, who’d had his first sexual experience while very young, with an older woman. From the director’s point of view, it seemed that this experience had affected his entire way of being in romantic relationships. She wanted to make a film that looked at that type of formative moment. “This is my way of trying, not trying to reimagine what happened to him, but trying to understand the mentality or at least the headspace of a boy that is going through the same thing,” she said. “And, even on a really a small level, the consequences and the changes that it’s going to have on his personal relationships and his immediate life.”

For Davka, those changes come quickly. He withdraws from his mother and loses his ease with Anuka. He goes looking for the woman, but she is nowhere to be found, and he has no outlet for his confusion. “He’s really searching for a ghost,” Purev-Ochir said. The dark irony is that this boy’s first intimate encounter has left him profoundly alone.