The Unexpected Virtue of Knowing That You Don’t Know: A review of Oscar-nom Timbuktu

Ed. note: This post was originally published on the Community site. Spoiler alert: it discusses main plot points of the film Timbuktu. 

The Academy awarded its highest honor—Best Picture—to a film whose title includes the phrase “The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.”

Though much (deeply warranted) ink has been has been tweeted over the marginalization of African Americans in this year’s Oscars ceremonies, and many a necessary deconstruction of the Best Picture nominee American Sniper has been put to print, I think the virtues of one particular film have gotten lost in the fray. I want to talk about one of the Best Foreign Language Film nominees, Timbuktu, and the Unexpected Virtue of Knowing That You Don’t Know.

As the staggering box office success and Oscar nomination of American Sniper show, the overwhelming majority of the American public is drawn to the film’s shepherding metaphor: the American military (sheepdog) herds and protects non-interventionist American citizens (witless sheep) from their misguided pacifism and from vengeful fundamentalist Muslims (wolves). The majority of Americans did not seem to balk at the fundamentally misleading historical revision of the United States’ reasons for entering Iraq, nor were they deterred by the one-dimensional portrayal of Muslims as either sadistic extremists or anonymous civilian corpses. Even the film’s protagonist, sniper and Iraq war veteran Chris Kyle, is flatly compartmentalized as a know-all hero incapable of doubting the validity of his mission, making mistakes in judgment during battle, or shooting innocent people.

Sniper’s shepherding metaphor strings along each of its shrink-wrapped puppets with a script that aspires only to validate Kyle’s point of view and justify the invasion of Iraq. Eastwood’s vision of war plays into archetypes of Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Winner and Loser, Victim and Aggressor. In such a tightly controlled, conspicuously manicured narrative, no space is left to portray the painful, unkempt ambiguity and borderless destruction of modern warfare.

Set during Ansar Dine’s 2012 occupation of Northern Mali, Timbuktu dissolves the fabled camps of Bravery and Cowardice, Honesty and Zealotry, Love and War. Director Abderrahmane Sissako uses his sprawling cinematography, spare script, wary perspective, and cautious pace to give Timbuktu‘s flawed yet loving characters the space necessary to portray the unsettling awareness that blankets every conflict zone: everyone knows that they don’t know what will happen next; don’t know which of their beliefs are worth dying for anymore; don’t know what they’ve become capable of under fire.

Sissako sidesteps all reductive shepherding metaphors and instead captures the fundamental instability that each person, occupier or dissident, experiences under a brutal regime. The film portrays the layered, unpredictable social interchange between the militant Islamist group and the Malian citizens chafing under Sharia law: mandatory hijabs and gloves for women, bans on smoking, drinking, dancing, music, and soccer, among many other things. (One of the film’s most playful moments involves an Ansar Dine solider putting clumsily through the empty streets of Timbuktu on the back of a motorcycle, shouting “no sitting on the porch…no doing just any old thing!” into a megaphone). In a climate that demands life-or-death conviction, no one is entirely certain of what they stand for. Religious intentions are misguided, true piety is thwarted, love is sometimes met with love, sometimes with brutality, and lives searching for meaning are lost, meaninglessly. Everyone in Timbuktu knows that they don’t know, and everyone is trying to hide it.

Sissako’s most politically salient accomplishment is his nuanced illustration of how an occupied people live with and try to hide their knowing-not-knowing. Instead of nameless corpses or archetypal victims, the Muslim citizens of Timbuktu embody a broad range of coping mechanisms: brazen defiance and aggression (a woman refuses to wear gloves and challenges Sharia enforcers to instead cut off her hands); mischievous disobedience (a group of village boys exploit a loophole in the law and play soccer without a ball, in spite of the ban); passive resistance (a woman, arrested and sentenced to forty lashes for singing, kneels to be whipped; through her cries of pain, she sings the song she is being punished for); levelheaded appeals to logic and spirituality (the Imam of the city politely asks the jihadist soldiers marching through his mosque to leave everyone to “pray in peace,” pointing out that they are violating the sacred space by wearing shoes and carrying weapons. “Here, in Timbuktu, those who dedicate themselves to the faith do so with their minds, not their guns.”)

Timbuktu exposes the knowing-not-knowing of the Islamist occupiers in equal measure. While there are several wrenching portrayals of hypocritical jihad soldiers exploiting their power (a young solider arrests a girl in the street, abducts her, and forces her into an unauthorized marriage), the film primarily portrays jihad soldiers’ ideological confusion with a light, almost humorous touch. Abdelkerim, one of the senior jihad soldiers overseeing the occupation, is fundamentally unsure of his place in society. He sneaks cigarettes and drives his patrol jeep beyond the city limits for joy rides, doing 360’s in the sand. He indulges his blatant crush on a married woman by visiting her under the pretext of Sharia law enforcement. In one scene that is never explained, Abdelkerim dances wildly, rolling around and dragging himself through the dust while Zabou, the eccentric, rooster-touting homeless woman of the city, watches him. Through Abdelkerim’s character, Sissako illustrates the reason why jihadists do not obey the laws they impose: militants do not understand the spiritual reasoning of jihad, so they find Sharia law just as stifling as non-militant Malians do.

The film’s most vulnerable portrayal of the uncertainty that perpetuates Islamic extremism, however, comes in a scene where a young jihad soldier patrols the streets after dark. He locates the source of illegal music and radios his superiors to report that the musicians are “singing the praises of Allah.” There is a pause: the officers are surprised that the music is religious. No one gives orders. “Should I arrest them?” The young soldier finally asks. The camera cuts away before we can see what action anyone decides to take; the jihadists’ confusion and hesitance are left to linger on our palate.

Though the occupied citizens of Timbuktu achieve temporary solidarity by resisting the suffocating regime, Sissasko makes it clear that these citizens do not act with one mind. Often, women try to censor one another to appease the extremists; one man’s coping mechanism puts another man in harm’s way. Most notably, the citizens of Timbuktu internalize the violence of their occupiers and end up inflicting damage on each other instead of the regime that has pushed them to dire straits. Nowhere are the destructive effects of internalized brutality more tragically illustrated than in the first scene of this clip compilation. A devoted father and loving, peacefully inclined, musically gifted cow herder, Kidane approaches his neighbor about a cattle dispute and accidentally kills him when his gun discharges during a scuffle.

The violent conflicts of the film play out in an almost-dazed dance across the perpetually shifting sands of the Malian desert. There is no fixed point, no promise of respite or justice or Knowing.

Perhaps the most apt summation of Timbuktu’s Unexpected Virtue of Knowing That You Don’t Know is the visual metaphor bookending the film. The first shot of the movie shows a baby deer running through the desert. Jihad soldiers follow behind in a jeep, firing their machine guns and yelling “Don’t kill it, just tire it out!” It isn’t clear whether the pursuit is for sport, or…what else would they be chasing a baby deer for? The final shot of the film returns to the baby deer sprinting silently across the sand. A host of questions float throughout the film and linger long after the credits have rolled. What is the point of using power this way? Where in this exposed and unforgiving flatland could any hunted person possibly flee and shelter herself from such force?

In works of cinema such as American Sniper, it easy to dismiss reductive metaphors and turn away from self-righteousness. In films such as Timbuktu, it is very difficult to dismiss or turn away from truthful, dynamic, urgent yet open-ended inquiry. Unanswerable questions resist and cry out for answers in the same breath. The virtue of Knowing That You Don’t Know is an unexpected one because it responds authentically to cry and resistance alike.

Header image credit: Les Films du Worso – Dune Vision