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'Timbuktu' Finds Serenity Amid The Brutality Of Terrorism

courtesy of Cohen Media Group

Whenever anything like jihadists show up in recent movies, things go hysterical. There's yelling, people running around, machine guns and blood, and all manner of mayhem and anxiety. Director Abderrahmane Sissako comes from Mauritania where jihadists have control, but instead of ranting and raving, his latest work, Timbuktu, poses a quiet, understated, elegant, yet also scornful and devastating attack on the jihadists in his country.

The film cuts right to the core – as far as Sissako is concerned, jihadists despise human life and human beings.

Timbuktu begins with action and harsh sounds. Men in a pickup truck, faces and heads wrapped and obscured, chase a deer-like animal, firing automatic weapons. They use beautiful wood carvings for target practice, so right off the bat you know that these creeps hate both nature and art.

Much of Timbuktu is uncanny and serene. The movie surveys the country, which is mostly desert and beige, with accents of green trees. There’s a river, and a boy herds cattle both in the river and along the bank.

For most of the film, even the jihadists are quiet. One walks around the town of Timbuktu – beige adobe against beige desert against a haunting pale blue sky. He delivers edicts to the people through a bullhorn – no smoking, no music; for some reason new rules that women must wear socks and men must roll up their pants legs. While he talks through his loudspeaker, the sound evaporates. No people are visible. He’s talking to no one.

When the armed, arrogant jihadists enter a Timbuktu mosque, a religious man in white castigates them for entering a house of god with weapons. His voice is soft but certain. He says, “It’s time for prayer. We’d like to pray in peace. Please leave.”

Then there’s a fisherman, and the land on the far bank of the river shows a green tint, touched by gentle music from stringed instruments and a flute. In late day light, the fisherman works in silhouette with the beige hills in the background. A family lives near the river. A man and woman and their young daughter recline on the open side of their tent. At the end of the day; they speak in soft, affectionate voices; the daughter has a gorgeous smile.

Director Abderrahmane Sissako is not naïve. This is not the Garden of Eden. There’s struggle and strife and crime in this world. The jihadists try to eradicate anything that smacks of humanity. They patrol the desert in trucks and motorcycles, their weapons at the ready and their faces hidden from each other and from the world itself, while everyone else lives with faces open to the world and to each other.

The imam in the mosque asks the jihadists where is forgiveness and exchange between people, but the jihadists have no answer for that. Only once three young jihadists briefly left alone have idle chat about soccer – but soon they have to hide their youth and humanity.

Timbuktu is a film of transcendental patience. It doesn’t show anyone rising up against the jihadists, who do some terrible things by the end of the film. There’s no rebellion against them. The movie wages its battle with serenity and restful appreciation of humanity and the natural world. Four beautiful young adults – two men and two women – make music together. One man plays a guitar while a gorgeous, relaxed gap-toothed woman lying on her side sings. Outside, jihadists patrol the town – they have no connection to life other than to forbid it and try to make sure that everyone else is also joyless and obedient. And to a degree they succeed.

By the end of the movie, fright is taking over. Repose has vanished. But it’s interesting that what sticks in the mind’s eye after Timbuktu ends, are not the scenes of whipping or stoning, but the quiet certainty that things like music and beauty and the elegance of the landscape itself are what will last.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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