27 October 2011
DOHA: The scene opens upon a picturesque desert plain littered with the corpses of camels and men. Before the audience can glimpse this splendid vista, though, a few words materialize to set the scene.
The Arabian Peninsula, they inform you, was once a place ruled by tribes, whose loyalty was “as elusive as the shifting sands.”Well, you’ve got to start somewhere.
This visual and intellectual tableau commences Jean-Jacques Annaud’s “Black Gold,” which opened the Doha-Tribeca Film Festival Tuesday evening. It also marks the first feature film outing for the Doha Film Institute (DTFF’s parent organization), in co-production with Tunisian producer Tarek Ben Ammar’s Quinta Communications.
Annaud’s desert epic owes a great deal of its style and substance to films like Moustapha Akkad’s 1981 classic “Lion of the Desert,” about Sheikh Umar Mukhtar’s resistance to the Italian occupation of Libya, and Akkad’s 1975/1976 works “Al-Risalah” (“The Message”), about the rise and consolidation of the Muslim community, and, of course, David Lean’s 1962 prototype “Lawrence of Arabia,” the tale of T.E. Lawrence and the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule.
“Black Gold” too is set in the Arabian Peninsula – albeit a more fictive one than Lean’s version, and somewhat later, being set in the 1930s. Its premise is the bloody rivalry between two Arab houses – that of Amir Nassib (Antonio Banderas) and Amir Ammar (Mark Strong). The opening panorama depicts the aftermath of a battle from which Nassib emerged the victor.
The two families had been fighting over a stretch of barren desert called the Yellow Belt, over which, as Nassib remarks, they should be ashamed of having fought. The two rulers agree that henceforth this area will be a buffer zone, belonging to neither party.
Nassib’s terms for peace are to hold Ammar’s two young sons as hostages. As long as they are held in bond, the families cannot attack one another and Nassib promises to raise Awda and Saleh as his own sons.
As the bespectacled Awda bids his dad a tearful goodbye, Ammar has the opportunity to emit one of the movie’s dozens of immortal lines. “Tears,” he says, “are a waste of water.”
Nassib makes good on his word and, in a series of brisk shots of the boys’ youth, the camera notes that young Awda and “Princess Leila,” the Amir’s daughter, have a budding love interest. The ruler is also forward-thinking, so when the global economy comes knocking, in the form of a pair of Texans in a bi-plane, he sits up and takes notice.
Prospectors for a company called Texan Oil, the Americans inform Nassib they’re sure they’ll find sweet crude on his land. It happens they find it in the no-man’s land of the Yellow Belt but Nassib, impatient to improve the lot of his people, ignores this detail and begins building hospitals and schools in his capital of Hobeika. He builds a library too and makes the bookish Awda (who by now has grown into Tahar Rahim) his librarian.
The conniving emir is aware the Yellow Belt explorations will cause problems with Ammar, so he goes one better and betroths Prince Awda to Princess Leila (Freida Pinto), promptly declaring the treaty between Hobeika and Ammar null and void.
With James Horner’s soundtrack swelling from passionate piano to full orchestra, Awda tells his bride that he can’t consummate their marriage because “It’s just politics.”
Was it politics, she retorts, that made her watch him through her bedroom window all these years? Convinced he’s been too hasty, Awda decides to consummate their marriage.
A different fate lies in store for Awda’s older brother Saleh, who, aware of the rumblings of conflict between Nassib and his father, kills his guards and attempts to flee home. From this point, relations between the houses become strained beyond repair and the film moves, in epic fashion, to reshape those ties and the future of their country.
Many great films have a strong source text. Lean’s film was based Lawrence’s memoir “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” Annaud’s is derived from a 1957 novel by Hans Ruesch that has variously been titled “South of the Heart: A Novel of Modern Arabia,” “The Great Thirst” and “The Arab.”
As a director, Jean-Jacques Annaud has moved back and forth between art house work – like his 1992 film “The Lover” – and serious commercial cinema – “The Name of the Rose” (1986), for example, or “Enemy at the Gates” (2001). It may or may not have been lucrative for him, but “Black Gold” will not be remembered as one of his fine works.
It isn’t a complete disaster. The cinematography of Jean-Marie Dreujou makes excellent use of the landscape and light afforded by the film’s Qatari and Tunisian locations and some of the characters are nicely formed.
Probably the best of these is a relatively minor figure, Ali Ibn Ammar (Riz Ahmed), Awda’s half brother and Ammar’s “least-favored son.”
A doctor frustrated by the restrictive customs of the Ammar clan, who refuse to allow him to administer Western medicine, Ali is, in Ahmed’s hands, an effectively understated comic character.
His self-consciously anachronistic role serves as a skeptical commentary upon the costume drama surrounding him. As agnostic as he is amusing, Ali is killed off in the penultimate act by the writers – Annaud, who helped adapt Ruesch’s novel for the screen with Menno Meyjes – and made to embrace Islam.
Like the desert epics that came before it, this film’s recasting of the tale of a charismatic figure who rallies Arabian tribes around him takes its inspiration from the life of the Prophet Mohammad. But it’s tempting to see the story’s incidental details as emulating more recent historical models.
For students of the region’s history, the rivalry between the Ammar and Nassib clans will be reminiscent of that between the House of Saud and the Hashemite inheritors of the Sharif of Mecca – who worked with the British to shake off Ottoman rule.
When Awda finds himself back in his father’s house as Nassib’s emissary, a member of Ammar’s majlis al-shura informs him that, “under the principals of taqiyya, you, as a Muslim, are allowed to dissemble” – taqiyya being a practice students of orientalism have associated with Shiite (not Sunni) Islam.
The story’s efforts to contrast Nassib’s embrace of all things Western and Ammar’s more anachronistic anti-foreign advisers may remind some viewers of the contemporary divide between the politics of Al-Qaeda-style anti-imperialism and that of other, more welcoming, Muslim states – that of Qatar, for instance.
“Personally I don’t mind foreigners,” Awda tells Nassib in the film’s dying moments. “We can learn from them. I think they could learn something from us too.”
Whatever merit lies in this sort of public relations cinema, it’s undermined by weak writing. Sometimes it expresses itself in characterization. Awda’s instantaneous transformation from a timid bookworm to a crack field commander in overwhelming Nassib’s mechanized army is particularly hard to swallow.
Other times, it takes the form of corny dialogue. When a cholera outbreak devastates Nassib’s people, for instance, an underling informs him that Europe hasn’t experienced such a plague in over 100 years.
In response Nassib intones “To be an Arab is truly to be a waiter at the world’s banquet.”
When Pinto’s Princess Leila consoles Awda for the loss of his father, then smiles and says, “Though we have lost a life, we’ve also found one!” – meaning that she’s pregnant – it’s hard not to chuckle.
The Doha Tribeca Film Festival runs until Oct. 29. For more information see: http://www.dohafilminstitute.com/filmfestival
Copyright The Daily Star 2011.
