Slice-of-life drama in ‘Wolf and Sheep’ – Musings, stunning landscapes in ‘Mimosas’

This news has been read 4506 times!

LOS ANGELES, May 21, (RTRS): Winner of the Directors’ Fortnight’s top kudos, the art cinema prize, the slim, slice-of-life drama “Wolf and Sheep” mixes naturalistic, ethnographic images with an appealing thread of folkloric magical realism. The action is set in an Afghan village that 26-year-old tyro director-writer Shahrbanoo Sadat, Afghanistan’s first-ever female feature helmer, was forced to re-create in the dusty mountains of neighboring Tajikistan due to security concerns for her mostly foreign crew — and the presence in the tale of a naked, green, female fairy. Sadat also imported 38 Hazaragi-speaking villagers, adults, and children, who play versions of themselves. Although more compelling on a visual level than a narrative one, the movie represents an enticing festival and niche event item, as well as a vision of Sadat’s homeland that is far different from what the media normally depicts.

Inspired by the remote, rural outpost in central Afghanistan where the director-writer spent her teenage years feeling like an outsider, the film immediately establishes the dynamic of a place out of time, a spot where not much happens and where everyone knows everyone else’s business and discusses it ad infinitum. It is also a village where the sexes remain very much segregated. The women cook, clean, and dry dung patties at home while affairs such as funerals, animal husbandry (and sacrifices), and deciding justice are managed outdoors, man to man.

The local children, who herd flocks of goats and sheep up and down the mountain each day, also cleave into same-sex groups. As the animals graze, their bells tinkling in the distance, a group of girls talks about marriage and pretends to smoke cigarettes, while the roughhousing boys practice with their slingshots and exchange surprisingly vulgar insults. Even among such a tiny population there are cliques: The other girls shun Sediqa (Sediqa Rasuli), a melancholy-looking youngster, chattering that Sediqa’s grandmother became blind after nursing a snake.

Young Qodrat (Qodratollah Qadiri), whose father’s funeral takes place in the film’s opening moments, also is the subject of gossip when his mother becomes the third wife of a local man who doesn’t want to keep her kids. One day while Qodrat is brooding, he runs into Sediqa and instructs her on the fine art of slingshot braiding. Sharing a bond as outsiders, the two youngsters explore the mountainside together a few times, but their friendship isn’t fated to continue.

Since the pace of village life is slow and repetitive, it’s difficult to discern how much time passes, but certain incidents stand out. At one point, a slingshot novice accidentally (but bloodily) puts out another boy’s eye, and the injured youth’s father demands justice in the form of a bull. At another point, an unseen wolf attacks and kills some of the livestock, and the angry flock owners beat the little shepherds.

In contrast with her representation of mundane daily life, Sadat inserts some striking moments of magical realism, illustrating the folklore that lives large in the local imagination. At several points, the men and boys repeat the tale of the Kashmiri wolf, a creature that walks on two feet. A naked green fairy lives underneath the animal’s furry pelt. She was once captured by a felonious miller and forced to become his wife, but she managed to escape. Sadat depicts both fairy and wolf as eerie presences, stalking the landscape by night. Near the film’s conclusion, the rumor of armed men heading toward the village represents a more metaphorical wolfish rapacity.

Made on a modest budget (that includes 413 crowd-sourced contributions), the film is pleasing to the eye, with the non-professional actors wearing their own colorful clothing. There’s no production designer credit; per Danish producer Katja Adomeit, director Sadat designed the mud-and-stone dwellings herself, which workers then built in Tajikistan. Strong sound design also contributes to the you-are-there ambience.

“Mimosas”, the second feature from Morocco-based director Oliver Laxe, won the Nespresso Grand Prize at this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week, and Nespresso isn’t a terrible idea for anyone who walks in without preparation for this minimalist travelogue and crypto-Western, which offers relatively few clues to its goals and intents. Still, those familiar with the ethnographic works of Ben Rivers (who gets a thanks in the closing credits) and the films of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”) will find much to admire in the movie’s combination of spiritual musings and stunning landscapes. Favoring longueurs by design, it is a decidedly noncommercial project that asks to be taken or left on its own terms.

Combined

Laxe’s first feature, “You All Are Captains” (which showed in Directors’ Fortnight in 2010), combined fiction and documentary elements, and he has said that “Mimosas” was inspired by his own travels with Said Aagli, who plays one of the main characters. The plot concerns a caravan in Morocco that’s escorting a dying sheikh to the medieval city of Sijilmasa, where he will be buried. At the film’s outset — which one might easily mistake for being set centuries ago — the travelers consider whether to shorten the distance by going through the Atlas Mountains, even though it’s not clear if that holds a route to their destination.

In a disorienting transition, Laxe brings us to a seemingly more modern place, where there’s a recruiting call for workers. Shakib (Shakib Ben Omar), who appears to be a mechanic but doubles as an amateur preacher for the locals, is selected as a co-driver for the caravan. He is told that his goal is to help the group arrive safely. When he joins the travelers, he arrives by climbing over a hill, looking very much like a prophet.

Although the sheikh soon dies, two roguish members of the caravan, Said (Aagli) and Ahmed (Ahmed Hammoud), who seem to have had plans to steal from the dead man, claim to know the way through the mountains. And so the film goes off the beaten track, plot-wise and geographically. The movie’s largely scenic pleasures — both visual and aural, with a great deal of windswept soundscaping — wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in Ford or Hawks, whether it’s in a scene of river fording, a stunning shot of a lake by moonlight, or the simple sight of a mule nibbling at the sparse grass.

But as the group loses its bearings — there is a bit of Gus Van Sant’s “Gerry” here, and perhaps of Beckett as well — Shakib grows increasingly overt in his appeals to faith, which he feels will guide the way to Sijilmasa. It’s at this point that “Mimosas” begins to grow repetitive and perhaps more obscure, to the point that the most agnostic and literal-minded of viewers may have trouble going with the poetic flow. It’s also clearly the sort of film that can seem at once spartan and over-conceptualized, in the sense that its narrative has clearly developed out of a series of abstract, academic theses.

This news has been read 4506 times!