Joan of Arc of Mongolia

Joan of Arc of Mongolia, in addition to having a fairly lugubrious, awkward title, is an extremely leisurely film. This is a film so unhurried that the plot strand that begat the film's title isn't even referenced until more than an HOUR into the film, not that it necessarily gets started then. The first of the film's three hours takes place entirely on a train, nominally the Transsibberian Railway, and we get an entire crossection of people, from regional expert Lady Windermere (Delphine Seyrig), to uptight German schoolmarm Mueller-Vohwinkel (Irm Hermann), from a young French girl open to pretty much anything (Ines Sastre) to singers varying from ostentatious Broadway queen Fanny Ziegfeld (Gillian Scalici) to rotund German cherub Mickey Katz (Peter Kern), as well as the cartoonish, old-school Kalinka sisters, whose primary instrument appears to be the gong