Abderrahmane Sissako 2014 Mauritania
Starring: Ibrahim Ahmed dit Pinto, Toulou Kiki, Layla Walet Mohamed, Mehdi Ag Mohamed, Abel Jafri, Omar Haidara, Fatoumata Diawara
With news of religious unrest, the occupation of cities and war crimes masked as 'honour killings' breaking every day of every month you'd be forgiven for mistaking Mauritanian master Abderrahmane Sissako's latest, Timbuktu, for just another timely response. In truth you'd struggle to be more wrong as, not only is the film very much unlike almost anything else, it's also very Sissako, depicting reality imposing on the poetic just as beauty is broken by bullets fired by a feckless owner. In Sissako's previous release, Bamako (which starred, amongst others, Aïssa Maïga who I've talked up on here enough times that you're probably all bored of hearing about her), he imagined a trial of the leaders of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as if it was happening in a courtyard in Mali, the villagers playing witnesses, the proceedings accompanied by tearful sketches of song. Here he takes horrifying real events and makes a sobering movie of them. The gorgeous opening scene shows a profoundly cinematic image of a baby gazelle running when suddenly a hail of gunfire ruptures the silence and we see a jeep carrying a veritable banquet of machine gun-toting men, only their eyes visible under cloth coverings, and we realise that its youthful bound is actually an innocent creature running for its life. The kicker though is that, due to their own ineptitude and inexperience with such weapons, they're unable to actually hit it although the subsequent use of icons for target practice helps and they happily blast the breasts off traditional statues, leaving gaping holes where their eyes should be before leaving them deformed in the sand. As ever, the violence of the idiotic is often even more dangerous than that of the disciplined and knowledgeable and the men's discussion as they give chase says all that needs to be said about their attitude at that point, "Don't kill it, slow it down". In the film's final moments Sissako shows the gazelle again only for it to be almost immediately replaced by the frame of 12 year old Toya (the wonderfully poised Layla Walet Mohamed) dashing through the landscape, aiming for God knows where and bellowing with a grief she can barely understand. Another scene reverses this idea, when the Islamists (working under the flag of ISIL) ban football, giving a teenager 20 lashes and a criminal record for letting his ball bounce into their vicinity, and a group of youngsters react by staging a game complete with goal celebrations and flashy footwork but without a ball, their movements closer to pantomime than the real sport has ever been (although sometimes it's closer than many real-life clubs would like to admit). Also banned are music, smoking and women being seen barefoot and bare-handed, the men little realising that, as the residents are mostly peaceful, happy and truly religious, the conquest they're attempting is altogether unnecessary. As such when they arrive by motorbike they are both fearsome and futile and the locals treat them first with contempt and laughter then later with anger and flat-out defiance. Soon the situation escalates to the point that even turn-ups are declared mandatory and becomes absurd, or at least more absurd than before, the villains already have to communicate through a collection of translators, speaking as they do a combination of French, Arabic, Bambara, Tamasheq and, at a pinch, English. It would be comic if it wasn't for our knowledge that non-compliance will result in outright slaughter. And yet, Sissako doesn't paint the oppressors as all-out monsters, even as they bury a couple up to their necks in sand and stone their heads until they lull (an act Sissako doesn't dwell on, a brief glimpse is enough), they're still daft, unsure, petulant, distressed at their crimes, victims of peer pressure and, above all, flawed, frayed human beings. His own mercy outweighs theirs. By the end they've become cruel; a fine they impose on a semi-accidental murderer laying beyond anything he can logically pay, it's almost as if they're, for lack of a better term, dying to execute him, all the better to prove their power isn't as impotent as it appears. The offender in question is also painted in broad strokes, starting out as a good-natured farmer and family man he soon allows his anger to boil over into brutality. It would be easy to blame the rapidly graduating subjugation and the aggressive atmosphere he lives in but Sissako is quick to have him point out that he has had the gun he unwraps in front of his shocked wife since before their daughter was born. A masterpiece of grace, performance, assembly, vision and execution, it's hard to try and describe the film in terms of a comparison (should you want to). For me it called to mind Hannah Arendt's theory of The Banality Of Evil but several have called it a modern western. Here however the victors are not white-hatted avengers or all-too-powerful, black-hatted bandits. Nobody wins, and there's no black or white.
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