At first it looks merely sinister: men with machine guns in a village square reminding people that smoking and drinking are forbidden. The jihadists order a fishwife to wear gloves. How can I wear gloves? she protests. I’m selling fish! In a mosque an iman practically shoves them out the door: he will worship Allah in his own way, thank you. From the way it’s shot at a slight remove the scene plays like the one in The Godfather, Part II in which Don Ciccio’s men warn Corleone residents against hiding the young Vito Andolini. Only in the last hour does Abderrahmane Sissako reveal the consequences of defiance. A woman gets forty lashes for singing. A couple caught together are buried in the desert sand to the neck, then stoned.
In Sissako’s beautiful Timbuktu, flashes of surreality animate the accumulation of horrors. The woman who got the whipping keeps singing – beautifully, yearningly – through her tears. This movie about the conquest of the West African city by ISIL takes a while to sort out – is it an idyll or a political tract? When Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and his family are on screen, the former. A quietly defiant man with a fabulous grin, Kidane adores his daughter and flirts with his wife as if they’d just met. He strums an acoustic guitar. His children bring him goat’s milk in bowls. Little by little ISIL squeezes him. At the beginning of the picture jihadits fire at a fleeing gazelle. “Don’t shoot it, tire it!” one yells. If the image is a bit on the nose, closer to two-dollar symbolism, then Timbuktu‘s last scene will correct this impression. The movie answers my question: it’s both.
In the Timbuktu depicted in Sissako’s film, dogmatism comes in the form of neighbors, the people whom you once trusted. Petty rivalries turn rancorous when poverty, guns, and religion mix. The centerpiece is a confrontation between Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and the fisherman who speared one of Kidane’s cows to death. As Kidane and the assailant wrestle in the river a rifle report crackles. For a few seconds it’s unclear who’s been shot – if anyone’s been shot. Sissako observes the happenings in extreme long shot, the characters captured amid the immensity of Mali’s desert. A bravura piece of filmmaking, evoking Kiarostami and Paul Bowles, and typical of Sissako’s approach. Sometimes the tempo wobbles: a few scenes in the first third don’t gel, and it’s not clear for a while what Abel Jafri’s function is. But Sissako knows: do as this leader of men says, not what he does, else he’ll cut off your hands.
Of course Timbuktu is a “political” film — all films are. If it were a tract, I wouldn’t have minded at all. Instead, his frames liberate the performers; they’re up for whatever. The most absurd moment concerns the bumbling jihadists’ attempt to make a propaganda video. “I used to make music, rap music — in other words, living in sin,” one young fool says, fumbling like a kid in a grade school play. The jihadist threat isn’t just to America, Sissako says; Muslim cultures suffer most because they’re already regarded as terrorists or quislings by the West. They’re shown in weeping flashes on the news. Unsentimental but replete with feeling, Timbuktu counters the myth.
Humanizing The Vacuum 