Critics reviews

This is a literal slow burn, a deliberately paced sojourn through desert heat. If for no other reason, though, Mimosas is worth seeing for its images of indescribable beauty. There are the perilous inner workings of the mountains, the dust kicked up by a caravan of cars setting out at dawn—images that convince you this is a far more mystifying film than it initially seems.

The chief pleasure of Laxe's film is how it makes use of monumental locations in Morocco, setting the story against the grand splendors of mountains and wide-open deserts. The story of Mimosas is relatively simple, but the landscapes give it an epic sweep; they also make the story seem to exist outside of time, the eternal majesty of the setting overwhelming any momentary concerns.

At best ambiguous and at worst unfathomable... Flying high and wide, [cinematographer Mauro Herce] forges belief and fear into a bond with a landscape that doesn't care whose wishes prevail. The naturalistic sound design agrees, sifting scrabbling stones and rushing water into the thrumming silence of snow and sand. The sum is a movie that panders not at all to Western sensibilities, giving few pointers on a theme beyond the fortifying power of faith.

Perhaps Mimosas is nothing more than a high-minded (but very affectionate) paean to naïveté, an incomplete adventure that eschews both sophistication and interpretation. But in the rocky foothills, glistening mountain ponds, and dusky desert vistas—and in those marriages of natural landscapes and natural light, scraggly terrain and 16mm grain, quest and Herzog-ian cinematic undertaking—it finds something close to the shared terms of myth.

The weight of cultural myth hangs over Mimosas without mercy, especially as the possibility of any clear-cut narrative meaning slowly leaks from the film's beautifully composed frames. Yet there are concrete clues in the form of intertextual play with film history.

What ensues, apart from hazardous terrain challenges and murderous, roving bandits, bears not a little resemblance to Gus Van Sant's 2003 landscape poem Gerry, right down to that film's atmosphere of despair, indistinguishable from its lyrical abstraction.

The most obvious—and the most remarked upon, if least interrogated, in many similar movies—is the cinematography, which one might call "gorgeous," "striking," "beautiful," or any similar adjective. Mimosas is indeed all of these things, capturing palatial mountain structures with careful precision with regard to both framing and lighting, as well as watching taxis coast through the open desert at sunset from a few distinct, equally awe-inspiring shots.

It doesn't take a whole lot of work to make the deserts and Atlas Mountains of Morocco look breathtaking (being shot on 16mm admittedly helps). But Mimosas is far more than its jaw-dropping exterior, and Oliver Laxe is the tremendous force at its helm.

It's a neo-western about faith, inspired by Sufi mysticism, Roberto Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. It's an elliptical and adventurous odyssey with some very arresting 16mm cinematography.

Featuring terrific performances by its mostly non-professional cast, stunning landscapes, and hypnotic 16mm photography, Mimosas is tactile and sensual. Sure, there are some inexplicable leaps in time. But when those ruptures deliver exhilarating moments of cinema, like the image of taxis racing across the desert at sundown to an ominous score, who really cares if it all adds up?

Laxe produces genuine moral dilemmas, not "typical situations." By attending to the most basic problem of visual art—figures in a landscape—Laxe pinpoints the quotidian extraordinary.

Olivier Laxe's Mimosas, a lyrical celluloid journey through the remote valleys of southern Morocco, with minimal narrative but mesmerising cinematography, portents the arrival of a new cinematic voice working in the vein of a Lisandro Alonso or a Ben Rivers (a kinship evinced by the fact that the latter filmed the shoot of Mimosas for his film The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers).