+ Best Political Movie of the Year
+ Best Mauretanian Movie of the Year
 |
| A striking poster for Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu |
Timbuktu is the 6th feature from Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness/Heremakono (2002)), which he has co-written with Kessen Tall.
In and around the small Malian town of Timbuktu, the inhabitants are affected by the interference of Islamic fanatics, who take over power and subdue them to grotesque rules and strict sharia law.
We follow a few people on both sides of the dividing lines in Timbuktu: A man and his wife and daughter, who live in the desert. The town loon, a woman who is allowed more freedoms than others. A mother whose young daughter gets taken for marriage with a stranger. And an Islamist, who drives around the area and spreads terror, part of the fear-spreading rule.
Abel Jafri (The Passion of the Christ (2004)) portrays him and does so very persuasively. The Islamist thugs are not demonized here but shown as men that may or may not believe in the ideology they force upon others, but who all obviously relish the power that their tyranny provides them. They are scary and very real, as is the whole scenario of Timbuktu, which is based on the real life short occupation of the town by Islamist terrorist group Ansar Dine.
Timbuktu is made with a strong aesthetic sense (photography by Sofian El Fani (Blue Is the Warmest Colour/La Vie d'Adèle (2013))): The camera at times probes the characters, who appear beautiful, even if they are not by conventional standards; but they project their inner beings so as to appear beautiful, because they are themselves without facades. At other times it keeps its distance, making for poignant, strong moments.
Some of my favorite moments of the appropriately dispiriting Timbuktu were heightened by a subtle humor, a keen eye Sissako possesses that sees the absurd humor that is inherent in the grotesqueries of the Islamic fanaticism, whenever the tragedies don't have the front stage: SPOILER The young man who just can't perform convincingly for his fanatical video. The donkey that walks past the foolishness of the humans without a care in the world. Best of all was the scene of the boys playing invisible football due to a Islamic decree against footballs. This was one of the very few scenes enhanced with music, beautifully composed by Amin Bouhafa (Being Here/Vivre Ici (2009)).
As a Western, non-African or French-speaking audience member, the odds are against this somewhat parochial issue film that has complexities that goes over most Westerners' heads, but Timbuktu overcomes these hindrances with its universal humanism. I would have loved for it to show some answers to the challenge that Islamic fanaticism poses in so many countries today, but, regrettably, I found none.
I also feel that Sissako gives too much room SPOILER for the father who murders the fisherman to cast his verbal beautifications to his audiences in the film (and to us) about the desolate fates that now await his wife and daughter. (I had little patience for this, since I felt he should have just followed his wife's advice and left the gun at home.)
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Watch the trailer with English subtitles here
Cost: 2.8 mil. $
Box office: 10 mil. $ and counting
= Big hit
[Timbuktu is a sensational success story: It competed in Cannes last year and won two prizes, (not the main one). It was also Oscar-nominated as Best Foreign Film, losing to Ida (2013). It has made 1 mil. $ (10 % of the total gross) in the US. Its biggest market seems to have been France (the film is a Mauritanian/French co-production), where 1.1 mil. people paid admission. It also won 7 out of 8 nominations at the Cesar Awards (French Oscar), setting a new record for an African film there.]
What do you think of Timbuktu?
If you've seen other films by Sissako, do please tell about them
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