Timbuktu

The opening montage establishes the targets of the religious fundamentalists who have taken over the Mali area. The first is life: men firing at a frightened gazelle are instructed “Don’t kill it; tire it.” The second is culture: they shoot up a row of African sculpture, especially blowing off heads and breasts. 

The local imam orders the soldiers out of his temple, preferring the jihad of prayer over that of weapons. Later he gently corrects the jihadists’ leader, pointing out their divergence from Muslim principles like fairness, humanity, leniency, a respect for life. That's a healthy distinction between Islam proper and the extremist aberration that unfortunately predominates today.

But the jihadists persist. A man gets 40 lashes for playing the verboten football. So the lads gather to play a game without a ball, with remarkable agreement on which shots are stopped and which score. A woman gets 80 lashes for being participating in a home musical evening. A woman is punished for not wearing gloves even though she’s selling fish. Women are ordered to wear socks in the market and men to roll up their pant legs. The jihadists are all in khaki and black, their faces usually hidden. The colours erupt and the faces bared in the bedouin’s tent and in the music scenes. 

That bedouin lives blissfully in the desert with his wife, daughter and a young herd-boy, the only family that has not yet fled the jihadists. He thinks they’re secure from their extremism and violence. A jihadist officer has designs on the man’s wife, so doesn’t help when the bedouin faces death for the accidental death of the fisherman who killed his pregnant cow (named, with a nod to modernity, GPS; when he loses his GPS he loses his bearings). The bedouin stands trial, fails to win the widow’s pardon and can’t pay the sharia court’s requirement of 40 cows blood money. That was the levy after he says he has only seven cows left. His wife dies with him in her rush to see him one last time. The film ends with the bedouin’s two children running, their family killed, Their helpless flight parallels the gazelle’s. They too will be profoundly tired if not killed, as the sharia marches righteously and murderously on.

As the blood levy demonstrates, the sharia court flexes mightily to serve its soldiers. A tortuous logic justifies why a soldier was allowed to steal away in the night and marry the girl her mother had refused him permission to marry. The officer lusting after the bedouin’s wife steals an elaborate private dance, apparently with voodoo roots, at the local madwoman’s. He even gets away with smoking.

     There are scenes of breathtaking beauty, in tragic contrast to the suffering of the people. The lusting officer pauses to machine gun a pudendal shrub amid the dunes. In a stunning long shot the bedouin moves through the lake away from the man he’s just killed, leaving his trail in the water as in the sand and in his now doomed life. After his gun goes off both men lie in the water, as if both are dead, which they effectively are as the bedouin faithfully accepts his plight as Allah’s will. The bedouin’s testimony is as movingly beautiful as the judge’s justice is venal. This film remarkably combines aesthetic beauty and moral indignation.