There’s a moment in Timbuktu where a woman handling fish in a market with her bare hands is violently threatened by a Jihadist soldier. He demands that she wear thick leather gloves despite the blatant impracticality; it is indecent for a woman’s hands to be visible.
The point of this scene, and Timbuktu at large, is that the strict rules of Sharia law leave little room for common sense or forgiveness. In one of the film’s more interesting instances, the leader of this self-appointed militia secretly smokes a cigarette despite punishing others for doing the same.
On an allegorical level, the soldiers represent the evil of implementing such stiff ideology, yet they themselves demonstrate an essential flaw to their methods — we live in a fluid and fallen world where ethics created by a computer manual can lead to evil no matter what the choice. But the problem here has to do with the manual they’re using.
Almost every scene is a reiteration of this same point: an unmarried couple are stoned to death, a shepherd kills a fisherman in a fist fight which unintentionally escalates, and a woman is given 40 lashes for singing and playing music. In this scary world there is no room for personal expression or mistakes, one must conform or be punished.
The film is structured as a slice of life that depicts this small town’s transition. Often characters will be in one scene and not appear in the rest of the film. Timbuktu is more about the small insignificant town (hence the title) and the allegorical implications than any of the individuals.
There are a handful of characters that get some screen time, but even they are not developed to where we can imagine their existence beyond the frame of the movie. Thus, each sequence plays out almost like a self-contained vignette where we already know the outcome because we’ve seen it in a previous instance. Even the main storyline — the quarrel between the cattle owner and the fisherman — is just a longer and more drawn out redundancy.
It also doesn’t help that better films like A Separation and The Patience Stone — both about how Islamic fundamentalism effects and affects individuals — have already tackled this subject matter with deeper pathos and profounder stories.
For me, this film was like not getting invited to an event all your friends won’t shut up about. This Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film has gotten universal acclaim from critics and is currently sitting at 99 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Many are calling it a masterpiece. I think it is too simplistically superficial to merit such profound hyperbole.
Although Abderrahmane Sissako’s film has short instances of aesthetic poetry (one standout is where a group of kids play soccer without a ball because the game is forbidden) and a few powerful scenes, it is wildly uneven as a whole and far less than the sum of its parts.
Undoubtedly, the message is important and affecting, but the problem with Timbuktu’s articulation is the needless repetition and disjointed storytelling which only leads to the same thing we’ve seen before: more tragedy.
