Mimosas (2016)

Directed by: Oliver Laxe | 96 minutes | drama | Actors: Ahmed Hammoud, Shakib Ben Omar, Said Aagli, Ikram Anzouli, Ahmed El Othemani, Hamid Fardjad, Margarita Albores, Abdelatif Hwidar, Ilham Oujri, Moe Mohamed Oummad, Hassan Ben Badida, Mohammed Ikrizzi

British experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers launched his ‘The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers’ in 2015 – complete with installation art – about a westerns director who has a bit of a buzz and who lives in Northern Ireland. Africa is working on a feature film. That filmmaker was portrayed by Oliver Laxe and the footage featured in that film is from his directed “spiritual western” “Mimosas” (2016). Rivers’ film – or at least part of it – is in fact a ‘making of’ of Laxe’s. From that connection you can already see that ‘Mimosas’ is also on the experimental side, although the film stands alone and is more accessible than Rivers’ work. The Spanish-French filmmaker Oliver Laxe (1982) certainly managed to touch the critics in Cannes with his mystical fairy tale, because with ‘Mimosas’ he won the Critics Week Grand Prize at the film festival in the southern French seaside resort.

‘Mimosas’ is divided into three chapters, each named after a different part of the Islamic prayer ritual rakat. Religion and spirituality play a crucial role in the film and the style can best be called meditative: slow pace, many still shots and little dialogue and music. Laxe draws us into two different worlds at the same time; a modern one, in which we see a group of men looking for a job in the taxi; only a few can count themselves lucky on this day. Curiously, Shakib (Shakib Ben Omar) is also chosen, a car mechanic who likes to preach a lot and has an impressive knowledge of religion. His boss apparently has a special assignment for him… The other world into which Laxe takes us is a timeless mountain setting, where a small caravan of Bedouins takes an elderly sheikh to his final resting place in the medieval city of Sijilmasa, where he wants to be with his loved ones. to die. However, the journey across the impassable Atlas Mountains is too strenuous for him and the sheikh dies on the way. Ahmed (Ahmed Hammoud) and Saïd (Saïd Aagli), two bandits who travel with the caravan to rob the sheikh, offer to take the old man’s body to Sijilmasa for a fee. Soon Shakib reports and joins the tour group. Where Ahmed tries to squeeze his mustache by letting the mule carrying the corpse escape at night, Shakib turns out to be of the persistent kind, who insists on tracking down the animal and completing the journey. They desperately need each other as danger threatens from all sides.

With his film, Laxe wants to show that there is a deeper, spiritual world behind everyday reality. Hence the two worlds that are visible in the film. In doing so, he has devoted significantly more time to the timeless world, which unfolds to us like a desert road movie and which gives the characters – played very naturally by non-professional actors – the opportunity to present themselves to us. The concept behind the film is intriguing and ambitious, but it doesn’t work out as it should due to the uneven time distribution. Had the parallels been more solid, Laxe could have made his point better. But perhaps he deliberately keeps it vague, in order to stimulate his viewer to think. What ‘Mimosas’ is strong in are the breathtaking images of the Atlas Mountains. The camera work is stunning, with vistas of modest figures in imposing landscapes. Mules stumbling awkwardly through the snow to those few blades of grass that stick out, impassable rocky and arid plateaus through which the caravan has to make its way, and raging rivers that cleave the rock in half. These images – and sounds, because they also amplify the images – once again demonstrate how insignificant humans are in relation to nature. That nature, which has both a meditative and an energizing effect at the same time, exudes more spirituality than any religious motif.