A woman vehemently refuses to put on gloves (recently required) while selling fish in an outdoor market. A group of young men play fake soccer (recently banned) as they run around with an imaginary soccer ball. A coed group of friends risk playing live music (also recently banned) despite a potentially stringent penalty. The scene? Mali in West Africa. The occasion? The change from centuries-old traditions to the superimposed doctrine of Taliban-like invaders.
Nowhere in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu is the juxtaposition of the old and the new more starkly contrasted than the plight that befalls a nomadic tent-dwelling herder, Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), his wife and 12-year-old daughter. Seemingly worlds away from the chaotic strife in the nearby city, Kidane will soon become enmeshed in a tangled web of his own. Sissako pulls no punches in depicting the harshness of the tyranny of megaphone-wielding thugs, yet his superb styling does so with an ironic subtlety. Outstanding imagery shows admirable restraint and a keen depiction of detailed character traits tailor the events to the most human level. There’s plenty of horror here, yet an absence of heavy-handed agitprop.
Ironies abound. Despite representing the heart and soul of the film, Kidane has a tragic flaw of his own. He’s rooted in a rigid adherence to a moral code that reminds one of that of his very oppressors’ similarly stiff conduct. Those in authority, with their overarching self-appointment as special agents of God, seem to operate in two spheres. Their public persona adheres to rigidity and cant. In private, Sissako’s Islamist renegades turn to a more introspective mulling, albeit one that contains no practical consequence for changing their group think. Sissako recognizes the villains’ humanity within a brazenly inhuman undertaking. His presentation of their halted soul-searching is not an apology for them, but more an additional source of frustrating sadness.