Film review: Timbuktu
Spoiler alert: This review does not describe how the movie (or major plot-lines within) are concluded. But it does describe some scenes in detail.
Timbuktu (2014) is a French-Mauritian film shot in a mix of French, Arabic, Tamasheq, Bambara, and English. Exploring life in Timbuktu under the brief occupation of radical Islamists in the early part of this decade, Abderrahmane Sissako directs a visually striking and emotionally fraught film. Rather than following the arc of a single story, Timbuktu is structured as a series of vignettes, capturing the lives (and deaths) of myriad characters across this storied desert city.
One story is that of a cattle herder who lives a quiet life in the dunes outside the city, with his wife, daughter and a young boy who helps him herd cattle. The family is content enough, though the strains of living under the increasingly intrusive rule of the jihadists is starting to wear.
One day, however, a fisherman kills one of the cattle herder’s cows after the latter strays into his fishing nets, and the ensuing confrontation between the two ends in a tragedy that will tear both their families apart. The scene closes with a stunning panorama long-shot of one man retreating across a shallow river while the other makes one last gasp at life at the opposite bank. The movie is worth watching just for this shot alone.
Another story revolves around a group of young friends, who gather at night, in one of their homes, to sing songs. Music is, of course, banned under this regime — (so is smoking, and women in public not wearing socks) — and the diktat is regularly announced via loudspeaker by miscellaneous jihadists roaming about town.
Night after night, the jihadists attempt to follow the notes, trying to pinpoint the location of this music. One evening they identify the house but are surprised by the songs being sung. A jihadist calls his commander by mobile phone and says he’s found the house with singing. But he doesn’t know whether to go in and stop them because they are singing about god and his prophet.
He is met with silence at the other end of the line. The leader — who at one point proclaims “we are the guardians of all deeds” — is also stumped.
Such contradictions and hypocrisy of the jihadists are a running theme throughout Timbuktu.
One jihadist dances passionately — and beautifully — in secret, while, in a parallel scene, his comrades inflict a barbaric punishment for a trivial ‘crime’ based on flimsy evidence. Another group spends its days sitting on the streets debating football — Zidane versus Messi, France vs Brazil — while in between policing anyone that might actually be playing football.
One memorable scene captures a game of football played with an invisible ball. Two teams of boys run up and down a field, pass, tackle, cross, volley and head, all in poetic coordination. Their intuitive sense for the game is so acute that everyone knows exactly where the ball is at any given time, when a goal is scored and when a foul is committed. It is a triumph of the filmmaker’s imagination.
Interwoven with these stories are a series of scenes depicting, variously, the attempts by jihadists to impose their strict, and often absurd, doctrines on a hapless population.
We see one jihadist riddling an array of historic figurines — some art, others perhaps pre-Islamic religious idols — with bullets from a semi-automatic weapon. Most of his shots miss, but there is no shortage of supply. Soon enough these ancient artifacts are left shattered and smoldering with smoke.
Erasure: The shared objective of all extremist and revisionist ideologies.
Elsewhere, a couple of jihadists come across a man walking through town. They instruct him to roll up his pants. ‘All my pants are like this,’ he protests. ‘Roll them up; it’s the new law,’ they insist. He tries to roll them up, but the way they are cut means they just keep rolling back down. Exasperated, he simply removes his pants altogether and walks the rest of his journey in his underwear.
In the market, jihadists tell a fish vendor that she must wear gloves. ‘How can I handle fish if I’m wearing gloves,’ she remonstrates angrily, already fed-up with a series of dictums imposed in recent weeks.
But the jihadists are not all portrayed as doctrinaire and heartless. They are shown for the complex humans that they, like the rest of us, are. Some are new to the extremist ideology, and struggle with the cognitive dissonance they experience.
One young man tries again and again to shoot a video in which he wishes to explain his conversion from sinful rap musician to pious Islamist, but simply can’t bring himself to say the words with conviction. In the end he just hangs his head in failure. Another, a group leader, smokes in secret and pursues a married woman, but is also shown doing his best to save the woman’s husband when he is on death row.
For all its virtues, Timbuktu is not a flawless film. A couple of scenes are too lengthy — including one where a man spends several minutes describing his love for his family and another where a moderate cleric lectures a jihadist on the true meaning of jihad. Both elements could’ve been conveyed more concisely, but these are minor nitpicks against what is otherwise a masterful movie — disquieting, multi-faceted and human.
At the beginning of the movie we see a petrified deer sprinting through the desert as it’s pursued by gun-toting jihadists in a jeep. ‘Tire it. Tire it, don’t kill it,’ we hear one jihadist yell. The movie ends with three of the city’s residents also running through the desert, running to save themselves, but getting more tired with each step.
The deer hunt is a lovely allegory. Day after day, week after week, month after month, through strict and brutal imposition of arbitrary rules, the jihadists have simply tired out the local population.
And, thus, what is most striking in this movie is the silence. The depictions of stonings or public lashings we’re familiar with typically include a crowd that is shouting, baying for blood. In Sissako’s Timbuktu, onlookers are mute.
A couple accused of adultery is buried neck deep in dirt and stoned to death. But there are no sounds from anyone — not the jihadists throwing stones, not the onlookers, not even the couple themselves. All we hear are the soft thuds of stone on head. In another scene a woman receives 80 lashes for being caught singing. The jihadist whips robotically, in silence. The crowd watches defeated. The woman attempts at one point to sing — part challenge, part coping mechanism — but this only increases the ferocity of the lashings, and then all fall silent again.
Gradually, the human spirit is broken, and one lacks both the energy to protest and the empathy to feel. All one can do is keep going until fatigue no longer permits.
Timbuktu is available for free to Amazon Prime customers via Amazon Video, and can be rented through various other platforms including Google Play, Apple iTunes and M-GO and Vudu.
If you like this review, please recommend it so others can also read it.
