Mimosas, la voie de l'Atlas

The initial scenario is a city fronting a barren plain in Morocco, with the majestic Atlas mountains in the background. The manager of a taxi agency is assigning jobs to prospective drivers. He has a special assignment not involving driving; to guide an old, gravely ill sheik to Sijilmasa, where he expects to be buried. The sheik's wife and a few hired helpers are along for the trek. The driver chosen as guide is young Shakib. The other drivers are quick to point out his lack of experience but the boss credits him with having baraka (a divine blessing that provides spiritual force).

The whole purpose of the expedition is puzzling, as Sijilmassa is accessible by road. Nobody in the group (including Shakib) seems to know how to get to Sijilmassa and they finally choose to cut across the mountains on paths that cross dangerous rivers or are mere shelves carved in dizzying rock walls. The caravan doesn't attain its objective; the sheikh dies on the way and shortly after the group is beset by bandits.

Sijilmassa, a thriving city in the Middle Ages was abandoned at the beginning of the 19th century and now survives as a vast array of ruins frequented by tourists and archeologists (we see Sijilmassa in its former splendor in a wall painting at the beginning). The action is divided in three parts, each named after a Sufi prayer position; In fact religion is the key to the tale. Shakib's faith is childlike, sometimes unsophisticated and uninformed (which causes ribbing from his companions). He believes that the path to truth will be revealed to those that look sincerely for it. And, his religion is not purely a mental construct; it motivates his actions, as when he confronts a group of bandits single handed and poorly armed. In a dialogue near the end Shakib refers to Sijilmassa, in its medieval splendor, as a city of supernatural wonders, a step to Heaven or Heaven itself. This makes the story a religious pilgrimage which does not attain its end but where truths and revelations are found in the way.

French born Galician director Oliver Laxe tells the tale in an austere, minimalistic way (perhaps too much so at times) supported by the excellent cinematography of Mauro Herce that captures equally well the melancholic desert vistas and the stark, forbidding landscapes of the Atlas Mountains. Acting is flawless; most of the actors are nonprofessionals playing themselves. A quality film.

Morocco has - of late - been a major player in recent Arab cinema. Given the number of great films it has produced in recent years, I was expecting a great movie. I was sorely disappointed.

The movie revolves around a caravan wandering into the Atlas mountains, its' main aim to help a dying elderly sheikh to pass away and be buried in his native village. Death, however, has other plans, claiming the sheikh around twenty minutes into the film. At this point, the majority of the caravan backs out and leaves. The rest of the film follows the remaining members who uphold their end of the deal and persevere through the mountains with the sheikh's corpse.

The only plus in the movie is its' camera work, the focus being on the breathtaking majestic natural landscapes, often with a sulking face in the foreground. However, if I had wanted to see sulking faces against gorgeous backgrounds, I would probably visit a photo exhibition.

The film offers no shortage of flaws, including a deafening absence of music (amplifying the boredom ten-fold), wooden acting and occasional bleating by a rather lack-lustre cast (with the exception of Shakib), and a limited dialogue, with painfully long pauses in between each character's lines. Moreover, the entire plot, which could have easily been made into a 40 minute episode, was dragged out for FAR TOO LONG. Let's just say that death claimed the cinema audience's attention way before it claimed the sheikh's soul. I was later shocked that the film was one hour and thirty six minutes; it felt more like an eternity of boredom.

From the get-go, it was obvious that this film was aimed at international film festivals (I saw this film in one of those festivals). I could even picture artsy European hipsters saying 'Oh my God, this is so ethnic!'. Despite this, the film makes numerous religious allusions that - if not viewed by an Arabic/Muslim audience - will leave international audiences in the dark. A rather exclusive move that will probably not bode well in a non Middle- Eastern context.

Overall, this film is a perfect example of the stereotypical 'pretentious art film' that you will probably watch just once (hopefully never) unless you a) have an incurable case of insomnia or b) intend to spoil a perfectly good movie night.

I second the reviewer above in demanding my time back.

An spiritual journey into a human soul seeking for faith. Beautifully photographed and nicely told and crafted through 3 chapters that structure the whole film perfectly. Probably the only bad thing about the film would be the fact that it is not what i would call an enjoyable movie, or a movie that i would love to go back to eventually. And of course, not a movie you would expect to work in the box office. One of this "just for film festivals" movie that is definitely worth watching at least once.

After winning the FRIPESCI price with his first work, he won the Critics Week Grand Prize with this one. And last year, he won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize with his latest film (O que arde), all three of them in Cannes. Oliver Laxe is surely looking premising so far.

I want my time back. There is maybe 10 minutes of story. This movie could have five minutes and it would tell everything that happens. I don't get this idea of insanely long takes of people walking in a desert, other people sitting in silence inside traveling vehicles or dialogues that takes 30 seconds between every line. OK, I get the idea of different landscapes and cultures, blablabla but I have better things to do.

It is said by some that "Mimosas" is a 'contemporary Moroccan western' and why not. Over the decades we have come to learn that the Western is as much a state of mind as it is a genre and that it is not rooted in any particular time or place. The Western tropes apparent in "Mimosas" are a journey on horseback through mountainous terrain, in this case by three men tasked with taking the body of a dead sheik to his place of burial, (Tommy Lee Jones covered similar territory in the much more traditional "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"), together with a few gun attacks and a couple of killings. Indeed, were it not for an early sequence in a city or town involving a fleet of taxis we might be back two centuries and, if not in the American West, at least in recognizable 'Western' terrain and in one scene near the end of the film we could even be back 2,000 years.

In some respects you could say not a great deal happens, at least not conventionally, in Oliver Laxe's film, (it's only his second), and yet this is so much more than a beautifully photographed travelogue, (Laxe shot the film on location mostly in the Atlas mountains). There is an almost profound sense of both joy and sadness in the relationship that develops between the three men and their strange cargo as well as genuine sense of mystery, (many events are left unexplained). Laxe also gets wonderful performances from Ahmed Hammoud as the man who agrees to take the body in the first place and from Shakib Ben Omar as the little runt who proves to have a lot more going for him than meets the eye, (neither men are professional actors though Shakib did appear in Laxe's first film). There are also scenes here of such pure physicality that they almost rival those in "Aguirre, Wrath of God". I have yet to see Laxe's earlier "You are all Captains" but "Mimosas" certainly heralds the arrival of a major player in world cinema.