terrorism

U – July 22 (2018)

André Crous

The terrorist attack of 22 July 2011 is recreated in meticulous detail by focusing on people’s reactions to the horror rather than explaining the inexplicable.

U - July 22Norway
4*

Director:
Erik Poppe
Screenwriter:
Erik Poppe
Director of Photography:
Martin Otterbeck

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Utøya 22. juli

There is nothing to be done, because all of it has already happened. But for nearly 90 unbroken minutes, we accompany one girl as she flees the attack, hides from the gunfire and struggles to understand what has happened in this idyllic outpost in the Norwegian countryside. This is a depiction of the terror inflicted on a group of youths in July 2011 on the island of Utøya.

Director Erik Poppe’s brave decision to centre his entire film on one character is, without a doubt, the best possible choice he could have made. Not only does it keep the viewer in the dark about the full extent of the carnage, thus keeping us in suspense throughout, but it also anchors the emotions in one place instead of weaving a necessarily incomplete tapestry of various strands. In the film’s opening moments, following an incongruous sequence in the capital where a bomb has exploded, Kaia (Andrea Berntzen), right on the cusp of becoming an adult, looks straight into the camera and says, “You’ll never understand.” It turns out she has an earpiece and is speaking on the phone to her mother, who has called to inquire about her following the explosion in Oslo.

From this moment on, we follow Kaia wherever she goes, though at a slightly less intimate distance than Mátyás Erdély’s camera in the similarly lensed Son of Saul. She has recently fallen out with her younger sister, who made slightly inconsiderate comments in front of their fellow campers, which Kaia considered inappropriate. Thus, they get separated early on, and within a few moments, youths are rushing from the forest as shots ring out.

What follows is persistent confusion about the source of the attack, about whether it is even an attack, about what measures should be taken to elude the gunman and about how much longer this will take. Unlike a conventional work of fiction, there are no clear leaders, and even the villain is a big unknown, as we barely catch of a glimpse of him, with two or three chilling exceptions.

For 72 minutes, the actual length of the attack in 2011, we hear the bone-chilling shots on the soundtrack – sometimes farther away and seemingly duller, at other times up close with booms loudly reverberating enough to shake us in our seats. This is the music of the film, which doesn’t have a musical score and thus relies on the diegetic sound to provide it with the relevant soundscape.

In the foreground, Kaia is trying to deal with something she never expected she would face. After all, this is the calm, peaceful Norwegian countryside, not an American school. We already catch a glimpse of this distance from danger in the first few minutes, when there is some very superficial discussion about the bombing in Oslo. The only person who seems to be clued into the danger of what is going on is Issa (Sorosh Sadat), whose background makes him more sensitive to how others’ actions will shape people’s perception of him.

In retrospect, the Oslo-set opening sequence is wholly at odds with the rest of the film. Geographically, it is separate from the bulk of the film, which takes place on the island of Utøya. Temporally, it takes place a mere two hours before the events on the island but is shown almost exclusively through documentary (including surveillance) footage. Most importantly, however, it is not presented from Kaia’s perspective. Thus, we have two distinct sections in the film, even though both were the result of actions by the same man: the far-right terrorist, who luckily goes unnamed here, with even the actor uncredited. But the film would have been much better had it limited itself to the island. In that way, we would have learned about the bombing in Oslo the same way the children do: from each other, with much remaining opaque.

There is nothing exceptional about Kaia, and that is good. She is not immediately concerned with locating her sister because the adrenaline has overwhelmed her. Her efforts to save her sister and others are not heroic nor complicated: She does what she knows, but she knows as little as everyone else and is mostly functioning on a primal desire for survival by playing a potentially fatal real-life version of hide and seek.

Because we experience the story from Kaia’s perspective, we know almost nothing of the situation in general, except that people are in danger. We see them running, trying to get away; we see them after they have been shot; we see them dying; and we see them when they are already dead. As time passes, the body count increases, and we slowly the gravity of the invisible but very audible danger. Of course, this tight focus poses the director numerous dramatic challenges, including how to keep the story as realistic as possible and not inject unnecessary fictional drama or sugar into the mix.

Poppe appears to take the gamble late in the film that his apparent single-take staging absolves him of criticism that the narrative takes a melodramatic turn, but because of the focus on the single character, it is hard not to take notice. Hiding out with Magnus (Aleksander Holmen), a boy from the west coast city of Stavanger who openly admits the youth camp piqued his interest not because of the politics but because of the potential to meet girls, Kaia strikes up a cute conversation with him that sets up an emotionally manipulative ending to the film. The camera work is very well executed and whatever cuts there are invisible to the naked eye.

This is an ambitious and at times visceral, though not entirely successful, dramatisation of events on that tragic day in July 2011. The direction sometimes draws attention to itself, and beyond Kaia, her unanswered phone calls to her sister and the desperate phone calls between her and her mother, the film doesn’t offer much in the way of characterisation. It emphasises the confusion among the young people by having them ask the same questions over and over again – a natural and entirely logical response to this wholly unnatural event – but, except for the opening minutes, there is little chemistry between the characters, and it feels like a staged 72 minutes of tension rather than an ordeal filled with flesh-and-bone human beings.

That being said, this is a remarkable story told in a fresh way that makes the experience an unforgettable one. But if the director had spent as much time on developing his characters as he clearly did on blocking his actors, this could have been an extraordinary film.

Viewed at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival.

Timbuktu (2014)

André Crous

Splendid film about oppression in historic city occupied by Islamic radicals draws us in with its multifaceted view of humanity.

timbuktuFrance/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

Horses of God (2012)

André Crous

Les chevaux de dieuMorocco
3.5*

Director:
Nabil Ayouch
Screenwriter:
Jamal Belmahi
Director of Photography:
Hichame Alaouie

Running time: 115 minutes

Original title (French): Les chevaux de Dieu
Original title (Arabic): يا خيل الله‎
Transliterated Arabic title: Ya khail allah

Horses of God, a tale of two best friends who grow up in the slums of Casablanca and eventually escape a life of poverty at great cost, is one that is entirely true, and it offers us a glimpse into the lives of a few men from one neighbourhood who would turn to terrorism to give their lives a sense of direction.

Multiple explosions rocked Morocco’s largest city on May 16, 2003, when suicide bombers wreaked havoc in the city centre, setting off their bombs nearly simultaneously in restaurants frequented by non-Muslims (or apostates, according to them, because they are Muslims mixing with people from other religions). Although the reasons for their actions are not entirely clear, there is enough evidence to support at least a loose connection to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the general sentiment in the Muslim world that the invasions were an attack on a religion rather than a search for so-called terrorists.

Horses of God does an excellent job of depicting the living conditions of the eventual killers. All of them hail from a squatter camp on the outskirts of Casablanca called Sidi Moumen where, even at a young age, life for everyone seems destined to go nowhere, except through brute force. In the opening scene, we meet a boy who calls himself Yashin, after the sportsman he wishes to emulate, the Soviet-era goalkeeper Lev Yashin. His real name is Tarek, and he spends most of his time with his only friend, Nabil. Tarek’s brother, Hamid, is slightly older but full of anger and criminal ambition, and he protects his brother whenever he can by using a chain he carries with him.

But despite Hamid’s aggressive nature, we quickly realise he cares both for his brother and for his place in the family, as he tells his brother not to follow him into the underworld of crime, as he wants to be sure Tarek would take care of his mother if something ever happened to him. Sooner or later, something does happen to Hamid, and when he comes back, many years later, he is calm, accommodating and noticeably more religious.

As a child, he had admonished his brother about his relationship with Nabil by telling him not to “follow [Nabil] around like a monkey.” The importance of these words cannot be overstated, as they are key to our understanding of the events in the last act of the film, and in particular Hamid’s attitude toward his brother’s fast-growing fanaticism. This brand of religious activism, sponsored by an imam with a soothing voice, attracts Tarek because he had been disoriented and unmoored and had little to give his life much meaning (the storyline of the migrant worker Wasim who becomes a suicide bomber in Syriana is equally compelling without eliciting empathy). Tarek had always been the brunt of others’ jokes and actions, and Islam offered him a path on which to walk with others and feel like he had strong support.

Another very significant line is spoken late in the film by Fouad, the brother of Tarek’s love interest Ghislaine, whom he adores but whose attention he always shrinks from out of timidity or fear, contrary to his later views of life (“Whoever fears Allah will not fear any man,” he says). Fouad, who is around the age of 18, is driven through the city towards an area in the mountains where he and his friends will train, when he says, “It’ll be my first time in the city.”

These words should punch us in the gut, as we realise what a complete bubble of isolation these boys have inhabited all their lives in the slums, and the actions they are about to take all spring from the knowledge they have gained without experiencing the real world, and yet they are on the verge of invading that world and blowing it to pieces for completely selfish reasons: to be martyrs and go through the gates of heaven where “hundreds, thousands of Ghislaines” are waiting for them.

But while the depiction of the socio-economic crisis in which all these men find themselves is accomplished, and the cinematography is highly commendable, especially thanks to a sprinkling of breathtaking shots obtained through the use of a Flying Cam that zips across the shantytown as it pursues a particular character, the main character Tarek lacks the depth and expressiveness that would at least interest us in his personal development.

The film is notable not only for its representation of complex reasoning behind the decision to become a martyr in the name of a religion but also for its treatment of some very thorny issues in the Muslim world. It is surprising to see scenes in which the consumption of alcohol is shown to be widespread, and in a hair-raising scene early on, a moment of child-on-child rape is reminiscent of the equally harrowing scene in the 1981 Brazilian film Pixote. At another point in the film, the teenage Nabil looks in a mirror and tries on his mother’s lipstick. The camera doesn’t linger on him, and we don’t get any further explanation, but this sole indication that he has some gender issues, whatever the reason, is a fascinating revelation in an Arabic-language film.

Such scenes enrich the context of the boys’ living environment and go some way towards explaining, or at least illuminating, their reasons for choosing to turn their lives around by blowing themselves up. In this respect, however, it is not the trajectory of Tarek but of his older brother Hamid that is the most interesting, as he shows real self-doubt. Perhaps it is because he is more wise, having experienced much more hardship and dealt with more people in his time. By contrast, Tarek is always serious, never smiles and doesn’t get much of our empathy.

Director Nabil Ayouch’s use of the camera to tell his story is exceptional without it stealing the show, and his development of Hamid’s character is strong and credible. His film also breaks a number of taboos in a way that never has the look of sensationalism, and despite the desperate nature of life in Sidi Moumen, the universal aspects of family, survival and respect ensure the tale is at times very touching, even though we never empathize with the terrorists’ goals.