Mimosas

In 2015 the British artist and film­mak­er Ben Rivers released the (excel­lent) fea­ture, The Sky Trem­bles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Broth­ers, loose­ly based on a nov­el by Paul Bowles. In it, he began by film­ing the mak­ing of anoth­er movie being shot in and around Morocco’s Atlas moun­tain range, and his impres­sion­is­tic doo­dle lat­er mutates into a sur­re­al fic­tion as it nar­rows its focus­es to a sin­gle char­ac­ter, played by direc­tor Oliv­er Laxe.

The film that Rivers sub­sumed into his own was Laxe’s Mimosas which final­ly lands on the stream­ing plat­form MUBI after hav­ing pre­miered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

Men pass car keys out to eager work­ers as they each jos­tle for a paid gig as a taxi dri­ver. Out in the desert, where fares are like­ly few and far between. When the name Shak­ib Ben Omar is called, no-one steps for­ward, but the men say it’s okay as he can’t dri­ve. But Shak­ib is giv­en a spe­cial job, and as he begins to mono­logue about a clash between God and the Dev­il, the film segues into an extend­ed rever­ie (or is it?) he is tasked with trav­el­ling a treach­er­ous route with a nomadic reli­gious sect.

When the sheik pass­es away, he and two oth­er men must then trans­port his wrapped corpse to a Saha­ran trad­ing out­post. Along the way they men bick­er about the true nature of their quest, and Laxe cap­tures these minus­cule fig­ures trans­posed against the ver­tig­i­nous grandeur of the dusty moun­tain landscape.

There’s a touch of the Her­zogs to this gor­geous and opaque film if you’re will­ing to read it as a para­ble about the lit­er­al trans­port­ing of reli­gious fer­vour to far flung com­mu­ni­ties. There’s also an exis­ten­tial ele­ment to this jour­ney, as the char­ac­ters bat­tle against ruth­less ele­ments which remain utter­ly blind to their spir­i­tu­al cause. This becomes a test of faith for the men as events take a turn for the awk­ward, and it also becomes a test of faith for the view­er as the film seems to float freely into a more poet­i­cal­ly obscure terrain.

Mimosas is a lan­guid, light­ly exper­i­men­tal affair whose cen­tral con­ceit remains root­ed in myth and folk­lore. Visu­al­ly, it’s often breath­tak­ing, and Laxe has clear­ly plunged much time and effort into mak­ing sure the cul­tur­al details are spot on – the shawls, the pipes, the dia­logue, the mat­ted facial hair. Yet, it’s some­times a lit­tle tough to com­pre­hend what’s going on, and to what end this excit­ing, idio­syn­crat­ic film­mak­er is dri­ving towards.