DIRECTED BY: Oliver Laxe

FEATURING: Ahmed Hammoud, Shakib Ben Omar

PLOT: A traveler accepts a mission to escort a dying sheik through a mountain pass, assisted by a mysterious younger man sent to help him by unknown benefactors.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Every year, a handful of slow-paced, low-budget surreal features (usually European, sometimes from emerging markets) screen at film festivals, and quickly disappear from view and memory. This is one of them. Ultra-minimalist and lacking much visual texture beyond the glorious landscapes, its obscure basis in Sufi mysticism makes Mimosas unique, but not enough to overcome its baggage.

COMMENTS: There are two worlds in Mimosas. In one, a caravan of horses makes its way through Morocco’s snow-capped Atlas mountains, seeking to bury a sheik’s body in his homeland. These characters could have stepped out of an apocryphal chapter of the Old Testament or the Quran. The other is a modern world of junky taxis idling in a desert town, where scores of drivers jostle for rare fares. The mediator between these two worlds is young Shakib, a junior driver who we first see mocked by his fellow workers for messing up the details of the story of Iblis and Adam (when corrected, he responds, “let me finish my story, and interpret it as you want”). To his foreman’s amazement, Shakib is selected for a job; which, unaccountably, is to guide two roguish companions of the sheik on the quest to find his home town—no one knows exactly where it’s located—and put him at rest among his fathers.

Though Shakib may be inexperienced as a guide, he has one crucial trait: an unshakable faith, which shames the increasingly reluctant Ahmed into persevering through the rocks and snow, despite the fact that the city they are seeking seems to have vanished from all maps. Most of the movie is nothing more than a small team walking through the scenic landscape, with Shakib pressing Ahmed for his lack of faith; but the ending goes full-wacko, with the two worlds colliding, and Shakhib and Ahmed undertaking a new quest that crosses barriers of time and space.

With chapter titles taken from Sufi prayer positions and not a hint of blasphemy, there is little reason to doubt that the film’s attitude towards religion is sincere, which makes it more interesting. It has the shape of a religious parable, although the meaning is opaque. The Islamic influence makes it novel and exotic and gives the film a cultural leg up on similar projects; the unique perspective made it more intriguing to me than the superficially similar spiritual wilderness journey depicted in the The Ornithologist. Although it’s not a faith we Westerners generally associate with narrative subversion, there may be a future for Muslim surrealism.

Footage from the filming of Mimosas can be seen in Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, which stars director Oliver Laxe as a director who abandons the project he is filming (which is, in fact, Mimosas). Mimosas won the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s not currently on DVD, but you can find it for digital rental at distributor Grasshopper Film‘s site.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There is a strange enchantment woven here. If the film speaks to you at all, you can expect to fall under its spell.”–Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film (contemporaneous)