Reseñas de la crítica

It's always tempting to describe art works of obvious contemporary relevance as "timely," but to do so runs the risk of reducing them to abstract political statements or conversational bargaining chips. Timbuktu is such a film. It is, however, quite clearly one for the ages: an emphatically humanistic work that doesn't pretend to have answers to the problems it so gracefully depicts.

Sissako's feel for the desert landscapes of Africa here is as evocative as John Ford's was of the American southwest in his great late westerns. It is this effortless combination of docudrama and lyricism that ultimately elevates TIMBUKTU to the status of the transcendent.

The fact remains that there are few filmmakers alive today wearing a mantle of moral authority comparable to that which Sissako has taken upon himself, and if his film has been met with an extraordinary amount of acclaim, it is because he manages to wear this mantle lightly, and has not confused drubbing an audience with messages with profundity. I can't imagine the film having been made any other way, by anyone else – and this is one measure of greatness.

This is in no way the remorselessly grim film its subject matter might lead you to expect – it's full of life, irony, poetry and bitter unfairness. It demands respect, but it also earns it.

Sissako has rightly been praised for his ability to bring out the basic humanity on both sides of such diametrically opposed factions, but what impresses most in Timbuktu is his ability to express that humanity in such a subtle, formally restrained manner, calmly observing the way characters bring their respective energies and convictions to every interpersonal encounter.

Sissako stages [the murder], those surrounding it and their consequences as a series of visual and aural discordances anchored in the various ethnicities of his performers. The way they move, dress, speak, the sound of their voices, the music they play (or censor), the technology they resort to – all of this is rooted in a specific history, which they bring with them.

Sissako's film unfolds with a loose narrative surrounding a dispute between two residents of Timbuktu that ends in murder, but that's only one thread in a larger mosaic. Subtle acts of rebellion connect them all, the most potent involving a group of young men playing a soccer game despite lacking the necessary ball. It's a gorgeous sequence of protest against the arrogant tyranny of violence and fear.

It is difficult to unearth love, joy, and erotic charge in a story that begins with the killing of a man, includes capital punishment, and ends with the agonized features of an orphaned child. But this is what the Mauritanian filmmaker Abdulrahman Sissako does in Timbuktu.

In scene after beautifully measured scene, Sissako and his camera look past the Islamists' self-applied suits of armor—the long black cloaks and sunglasses that cloud their countenances along with their motives.

it's fittingly tragic that the film's soul lies with the woman seen in the shot cited at the top of this piece — a presumed-insane bohemian wanderer whose pursuits of happiness strike the oppressors as too strange to fit into a punishable box. Sissako has persuasively reflected a world in which alleged insanity's the only freedom from corruption.

Sissako is constructing a commentary on jihadism in strictly Muslim terms, his point being that militant fundamentalism is about control—often subverted desire—and power, not religious principles. This idea gets its most affecting expression through the plight of the movie's central figure, Kidane (the eminently likable Ibrahim Ahmed Dit Pino), the cowherd.

Abderrahmane Sissako's Timbuktu is bracingly original and unexpected—a welcome shock to the system for American moviegoers who've grown used to seeing prosaic melodrama in topical or torn-from-the-headline movies. This fearless poetic response to the jihadist occupation of the title city and its imposition of Sharia law unfolds in charged tableaux and conveys the wreckage of a civilization lyrically and potently, in 95 spare, suggestive minutes.