The name Timbuktu is synonymous with faraway places, having a Neverland allure to rival Hollywood's for anyone who's never actually been there. Historically a city of gold and now an endangered Unesco World Heritage site, modern-day Timbuktu is one of eight administrative capitals of the West African nation of Mali, which won independence from the French in 1960 after 63 years of colonial rule. In April 2012, the Mali military lost control of Timbuktu to "rebel forces," and in January 2013, France intervened to return control to the Mali government. Out of a complex mish-mosh of neocolonial, tribal, and Al-Qaeda interests, director Abderrahmane Sissako has refined an eerily serene fairy tale, which is now Mali's contender for best foreign-language Oscar. Timbuktu comes to San Francisco on Jan. 30 at Sundance Kabuki.
The first thing that strikes you is headscarves. To watch lithe, graceful nomads, city dwellers, and even evil sharia-enforcers slope along covered in flowing pastel garments is to desire a complete wardrobe overhaul. This film is super-aestheticized, super slow-paced. Sissako has some major cinematic gumption, holding his camera on the face of a comely nomad wife for what seems like hours as she squints into the sun extremely picturesquely. The stand-in Mauritanian landscape looks great. It's vast and remains as God created it. Sand, shrubs, the River Niger. A lone gazelle, running as beautifully as only a gazelle can, opens and closes the film. Pretty, very pretty.
The intense promotion of this film in Europe and the States vs. the fact it's yet to be shown in Mali leads one to believe Timbuktu is a fable concocted for Occidentals. One wonders, Why exactly? The director and stars were trotted out in tuxedos and tribal finery at Cannes 2014, and walked away with two prizes. The Francois Chalais Prize, given for "ethical values in journalism," will seem cruelly ironic to anyone abreast of news from Mali. But how many of us are? I certainly wasn't until I tried to make sense of Timbuktu, which, for all its National Geographic -tinged exotic chic, raises more doubts than it consoles.
Spoiler alert: The narrative is simple. A languid nomad lolls around in his tent in his headscarf, plays guitar, admires his young daughter, and speaks in dulcet tones to a wife who seems the more practical of the two. The nomad makes a bad decision when he packs heat to settle a dispute with the black fisherman who speared his favorite cow. During an underwater tussle the gun goes off. The nomad runs away, and is quickly apprehended by the meanies who have imposed sharia law. The nomad is nothing if not philosophical, and clearly states his readiness to die according to God's will. Well, he did murder the guy!
And die he does, as does his wife, who somehow gets her hands on another gun and storms the place of execution in a foolhardy attempt at dramatic climax. It's all sort of noir. The plot is not dissimilar to Sidney Lumet's Fugitive Kind (1960), with Brando as the nomad, in a script by Tennessee Williams, which needless to say is better written than this. The musicians of the world are forever menaced by the fanatically unlovable control freaks, be they Southern sheriffs or salafi-jihadists. Williams always clearly denounced corrupt small-town bullies. Sissako's moral parsings are far less crystalline.
Parallel to the highly unlikely nuclear-nomad-family plot-thread runs a character study of a jihadist captain, depicted as rather a meek soul. When the imam tells him to please not bring Kalachnikovs into his mosque, Abdelkrim and his gang retreat without a word. Even though the imam gets major screen-time distinguishing nice, inner jihad from naughty, militant jihad, Abdelkrim blurs the boundary by being both naughty and nice. Sure, he's party to a graphically filmed lapidation, but doesn't he take a humanizing cigarette break behind a dune? Doesn't he speak respectfully to Mrs. Nomad in the absence of her husband? He even averts his gaze from the public lashing of a woman caught singing. Mostly, it's the sympathetic face of the French actor playing him that makes you want to bum a cigarette off him.
Moral complexity is a good thing in works of art, but glossing over barbarity with one hand while you pretend to denounce it with the other is perhaps the only position left to the Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako, who has no doubt seen enough suffering, corruption, and destruction to last him several lifetimes. Why should he stick his neck out to court a fatwa? Hey, he's comin' to Hollywood. Watch for headscarves on Parisian runways. Wait. They're already there.