This is the time of year when all the foreign films submitted for an Oscar nomination last year slowly trickle into theaters around the country, giving us between-the-coasts critics a chance to see if the foreign branch did their job correctly. This year, they failed in one instance (glaringly so, IMHO). I have not seen Estonia's nominee, "Tangerines," and I missed the one-week window to see Russia's "Leviathan," but of the three other nominees I did see, only one was undeserving: Mauritania's "Timbuktu" (directed by a Malian--I don't know how they skirted the academy's strict rules on that one).
It is not surprising it made the cut, given its topicality: the story of a jihadist take-over of the Malian town of Timbuktu and its effect on the everyday lives of its citizens (based on actual events). The film is heavy with symbolism, bloated with metaphor (the first scene is a tip-off), and weighed-down by what I can only call a Western style of filmmaking (artfully-composed but artificial scenes, travel channel panoramas, an intrusive musical score that cues the audience on how it should feel during every scene).
I suspect the director, Abderrahmane Sissako (from Mali!), did not learn his craft indigenously. There is an artificiality to the scenes in the town itself--I never got the sense that any of the residents actually lived there, but were props placed into a staged and scrubbed environment. I'm not suggesting it was too clean to be Africa -- it simply wasn't lived-in. That, with the confusing storylines and two ludicrous set-pieces (see next paragraph), diminished the truly potent scenes in the film: a brutal whipping and stoning straight out of the Dark Ages, and a tense, insightful back-and-forth in an interrogation room between the protagonist Kidane (played by a fine, natural actor), his jihadi jailer, and their interpreter.
But I have to mention the two scenes that sent me over the edge: 1) kids playing soccer with an imaginary soccer ball (because the jihadists outlawed sports) -- the only thing missing was a flashing subtitle that read "STATEMENT"; and 2) one of the jihadi officals, in a private moment, doing an interpretive dance in front of a crazy Haitian woman's house. Please! (and while I am ranting, what was a Haitian woman doing in the middle of Africa, anyway?). One of many confounding details in this confounding film.
