Timbuktu
Abderrahmane Sissako (2014)
‘From here to Timbuktu’ – or ‘Timbucktoo’, as I think it was once conventionally spelt in English. For British people of my and earlier generations, Timbuktu primarily signifies a (any) far-off place. The online Free Dictionary, which acknowledges thisat sense of the word, also summarises Timbuktu in geographical and historical terms, as follows:
‘A city of central Mali near the Niger River northeast of Bamako. Founded in the 11th century by the Tuareg, it became a major trading center (primarily for gold and salt) and a center of Islamic learning by the 14th century. Timbuktu was sacked in 1591 by invaders from Morocco and fell to the French in 1894.’
Abderrahmane Sissako was born, in 1961, in Mauritania but spent most of the first twenty years of his life in Mali. The story of his film Timbuktu, which Sissako wrote with Kessen Tall, was suggested by the occupation of Mali in 2012-13 by the militant Islamist group Ansar Dine (‘helpers of the [Islamic] faith’) and by a particular incident that occurred during that time, the stoning of an unmarried couple in Aguelhok, a rural commune of Mali. One of Sissako’s many achievements in Timbuktu is to change utterly the traditional connotation of the place name. A Timbuktu occupied by an Islamic State-type faction is many miles away from being a far-off place.
In the film’s opening sequence, a gazelle is chased across desert by a jeep. Shots are being fired from the vehicle, then a man’s voice says, ‘Don’t kill it – tire it’. Target practice resumes with bullets hitting – in a startling percussion – an array of masks and statues, including that of a fertility goddess. The symbolism is obvious but Sissako achieves in this prologue an economical and incisive illustration of the dual rupture of Timbuktu, through the destruction of long-standing culture and the advent of a new (IS supporters would, of course, see it as the restoration of a regrettably long-lost) puritanism. Sissako dramatises – in ways that are sometimes funny, more often alarming – the co-existence of time-honoured ways of making a living, anachronistic dogma and modern preoccupations and technology. One group of jihadists discusses the merits of international football players rather than Islamic imperatives. Mobile phones are ubiquitous. The central storyline is catalysed by a cow named GPS. This is one of seven cattle owned by a herdsman called Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed). Amadou, a fisherman, has already warned Kidane’s foster-son, Issan (Mehdi A G Mohamed), who waters the animals, not to let them get too close to his nets. When GPS accidentally damages these, Amadou kills the cow and, in the ensuing set-to between him and the equally enraged Kidane, Amadou is accidentally shot dead. These deaths are a reminder that the human propensity for conflict and violence doesn’t need the tyranny of a perverted form of Islam in order to express itself but it’s Sharia law that defines Kidane’s punishment. The combination of randomness and inevitability in Timbuktu is formidable. The IS men walk round the streets, proclaiming through a megaphone one proscription after another: in spite of the Koranic justifications they claim for these rules, there’s a strong sense of making-them-up-as-you-go-along. The inevitable quality is an expression of both the rigid fundamentalism of the jihadists and the quiet conviction of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film-making.
In his exploration of a world in which its playing is forbidden, Sissako makes aptly, subtly powerful use of instrumental music (by Amin Bouhafa). One of Timbuktu’s most affecting moments comes during the lashing of a woman who has been caught singing to music, in the company of men who are not members of her family. At first, it seems that the sounds the woman is making as she is lashed are simply screams of pain; then her cries are transmuted, defiantly and piercingly, into song – after all, IS does not proscribe singing a cappella. This film is remarkable for its expressive soundtrack, and for metaphorical sound too. We repeatedly hear the IS men hitting a brick wall – as when the local imam chides them for aggressively entering the mosque where he and others are at prayer and the jihadists are unable to argue, or when one of their number makes a phone call to his superior to report the playing of music and to check whether, since the music is in praise of Allah, it’s still illegal.
Sissako and his DoP, Sofian El Fani, also create images that are both beautiful and terrifying – not least the long-held, panoramic shot that describes the aftermath to the confrontation between Kidane and Amadou. As Kidane walks away, we see the body of the stricken Amadou, a tiny object in the landscape, revive for a moment before dying. In spite of the jihadists’ soccer conversation, the playing of football is also vetoed by IS: a sequence in which teenage boys mime playing soccer – sans ball – has been widely and rightly praised. As will be clear from the above, there are several episodes involving animals. These images always capture the quality of movement and other characteristics of the particular species yet seem to comment too on the human situation in Sissako’s story. The white-pink sand of the desert naturally and strikingly throws into relief the characters photographed against it but Sofian El Fani’s palette is a beguiling blend of vivid and muted tones. The camera is always sensitive to texture too, in details like a woman’s long skirts trailing in the dust of a street.
It’s not only the extreme and traumatic experiences of the people in Timbuktu that make it an engrossing human drama. When Kidane and his wife, Satima (Toulou Kiki), drink tea together, before GPS’s trespass changes everything, the moment has an easy intimacy as well as, in retrospect, a tragic poignancy. (It calls to mind, in both respects, the great sequence in The Seventh Seal, in which the knight pauses to eat and drink with a couple and their child.) The cackling Zabou (Kettly Noel), although an arresting camera subject, is perhaps a relatively unoriginal crazy-seer figure but the acting throughout is strong. The playing is natural but the cast shape their characters strongly enough to make them creatures of drama rather than of documentary. The local jihadist leader Abdelkerim (Abel Jafri) is perhaps the most disturbing character in the story. He seems foolish and clumsily uncertain in everything he does, except when he’s firing a machine gun – at a couple of sand dunes the shape of which suggests female forms. Kidane’s daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed) complains that Abdelkerim always hangs round her and her mother when their father is absent. Timbuktu contains no ‘sex scenes’ as such yet one is always aware of frustrated sexual appetite as well as the misogyny of Islamic fundamentalism. In a similar way, the world that Sissako describes is based in violence of various kinds yet acts of outright violence account for only a few of the film’s ninety-seven minutes. (What there is has shocking impact.) ‘Don’t kill it – tire it’: those opening words echo throughout. By the end of Timbuktu, people as well as animals have been, or are being, hunted down. The moral eloquence and art-that-conceals-art authority of this film make most of what you see and hear at the current cinema seem feeble.
29 May 2015