Splendid film about oppression in historic city occupied by Islamic radicals draws us in with its multifaceted view of humanity.
France/Mauritania
4*
Director:
Abderrahmane Sissako
Screenwriters:
Abderrahmane Sissako
Kessen Tall
Director of Photography:
Sofian El Fani
Running time: 95 minutes
Born in Mauritania and raised in Mali, Abderrahmane Sissako has set his last two films in the latter, their respective titles referring directly to the country’s two most famous cities. His thoroughly engaging Bamako literally put the World Bank on trial, and Timbuktu examines life under the Islamists who controlled the famed city with its mud buildings for a few months during the Northern Mali conflict in 2012.
Timbuktu was actually shot in Mauritania, and we don’t get a coherent impression of the city in the film, but rather snapshots of characters at various places, mostly inside their homes, under their tents, at the lake where they fish and on the plains where their cattle graze. We don’t know at what point in time the film is set, but what is clear is that the self-installed Islamist overlords are not welcome in the city.
The opening shot is a memorable one. A gazelle is running in total silence, faster and faster, seemingly gracefully, until we hear the rat-a-tat of machine guns. The men in pursuit on the back of a Land Rover are Islamic extremists, whose demands include that Sharia law be carried out, meaning – as we see in the next shot, when wood carvings are shot to pieces – traditional culture or any form of idolatry is rejected. Music is also forbidden, and people have to start covering themselves. Men have to pull their socks up, and women have to wear gloves. The latter demand leads to a bitter confrontation between a strong-willed fishmonger, already fed up with having to wear a veil, who points out the absurdity of her having to handle fish with gloves on.
Such scenes of tension are essential to making this film and its topic accessible, especially to a Western audience. We naturally side with the women who resist the oppression by the all-male ultra-orthodox wing of Islam, who see no contradiction in using Western-made automobiles, mobile phones and video cameras while condemning the sin that is the West and all its works. The hypocrisy of the movement is exemplified by a character called Abdelkrim, who doesn’t only smoke, albeit behind a tree where he is not in the company of his fellow jihadis, but also openly covets a married woman.
Every scene that makes the sham and the friction within the movement visible is wonderful because it gives the audience a real sense of life’s many facets and demonstrates how the director is not interested in presenting the Islamists as a unified block of identical individuals. Unfortunately, Sissako does not do a very good job of introducing his characters to the audience, and it takes us nearly half the film to learn one of the main characters is called Kidane. Living a modest life with his wife, Satima, and their daughter, Toya, he is proud of his eight cows and has a young boy, Issan, look after them during the day.
But the cows are not acting in lockstep either, and when the pride of the drove, humorously called GPS, veers off-course and into the nets of a local fisherman, Kidane’s life takes an unexpected turn that shows just how fragile the peace is in this seemingly laid-back community.
Elsewhere in Timbuktu, a group of young people are arrested and tried when they get caught late at night singing songs together in the privacy of a house, the same way hundreds of thousands of other youngsters their age in other parts of the world spend their evenings.
Many of these scenes have powerful conclusions, sometimes admittedly verging on the melodramatic, but Sissako is very adept at striking a consistent tone in his story. He uses the nuances of the events and our natural attachment to very likeable (mostly female) characters to bring us along on a ride that has many a tragic undertone.
The images are some of the most beautiful in African cinema but never overwhelm our experience and understanding of the narrative. On the contrary, as can be seen in a key scene that takes place at a lake, what starts out as a gorgeous depiction of nature sometimes ends with a startling reminder that man’s impact on nature can be devastating.
Far from being activist or anti-Muslim, Timbuktu shows the strife ordinary, God-fearing people are facing because of a handful of self-righteous individuals who cannot even live by their own rules but insist on carrying out their interpretation of Allah’s regulations on a society that was functioning very well before they came along and ruined it all.
Viewed at the 2014 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival