23 February 2008

BEIRUT: It's been remarked, often by now, that fact-based documentary and fiction-based feature film are less different than you'd assume. Plenty of filmmakers move back and forth between the two forms, deploying the same skills, sometimes cogently arguing that, at the end of the day, it's all cinema.

Anyway, documentarians aren't bound to be any more "objective" than fiction filmmakers. They may abjure didacticism and are as likely as other filmmakers to not let facts get in the way of telling "the truth," - however "the truth" may be defined. Still, as the proliferation of reality television shows, docudramas and movies "based-on-a-true-story" testifies, veracity clearly has an allure. Sometimes reality generates more compelling stories than the imagination.

For those who see documentary and feature film as symbiotic, there is a peculiar example of this symbiosis in "Waiting for Pasolini." Directed by Daoud Oulad-Syad from a screenplay by Youssef Fadel, the movie took the prize for best film in the Arab cinema competition of the 2007 Cairo International Film Festival.

After watching it, some observers - though evidently none among the Cairo jury - wondered why, or at least how, it was made.

"Waiting for Pasolini" opens on a wind-swept desert landscape where Thami (Mohamed Majd, of "Le Grand Voyage" among other films) is on a rooftop installing a satellite television dish. A car stops and one of the occupants tells him: "Tomorrow the Italians will come for a casting call."

"Pasolini" is set in the southern Moroccan town of Ouarzazate. Since at least the 1960s, it has attracted Western film production companies, and the imposing Ouarzazate Studios now abuts the town. Drawn to the desert and mountain landscapes, laissez-faire state policies and cheap labor, Western producers have found a low-cost approximation of "the holy land" in Ouarzazate, and thus an ideal location for both biblical and swords-and-sandals epics.

David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" and Ridley Scott's "Gladiator" and "Kingdom of Heaven" are among the big-budget pictures shot in Ouarzazate, whose under- and unemployed residents fill the ranks of extras. One of the town's filmic trail-blazers was Italian leftist intellectual, author and auteur Pier Paolo Pasolini, who shot his "Oedipus Rex" there in 1966.

Thami is excited to hear the Italians are coming. As a young man, he worked as Pasolini's personal assistant during the "Oedipus Rex" shoot, carrying his bags and sleeping in his room. His assumption that Pasolini is returning becomes a guarantee to the townspeople that they will all be paid well enough to secure their livelihoods for the next few months.

A barber friend, another part-time extra, informs Thami that Pasolini died decades ago. "It was a violent death," the barber says, and they speculate whether he was the victim of a state conspiracy or a church conspiracy. Thami's depictions of Pasolini's messianic largesse - to which the satellite dish-installer has staked his own flowering prestige - continue despite the news of his passing, setting fiction on a collision course with the truth.

The Ouarzazatis gather for the Italians' casting call. Sitting on bleachers in the sun, a fence between them and the filmmakers, the session has a zoo-like air. A Moroccan assistant director informs the aspiring extras that the director needs light-skinned women only, and then waits for the director to point to suitable faces so he can call them to be registered. When the session's done, a woman complains that the process isn't fair.

"We've been sitting here for hours and for what?" the woman asks. "You always pick the same people."

By this point, the nagging familiarity of the story is confirmed. This casting sequence re-stages, nearly verbatim, a scene from "Ouarzazate Movie," Ali Essafi's 2001 documentary about the town whose entire economy has become geared to the international film industry. Well known in independent film circles (it was screened last November in various cities across the region, courtesy of the pan-Arab contemporary arts festival Meeting Points 5), the film's enthusiastic reception went far to secure the Moroccan documentarian's reputation.

The casting call isn't the only plagiarized episode in the film. Also lifted straight from Essafi's movie is a scene where Thami and some pals huddle around a television and VCR, where they watch one of the epic films they worked on - replaying the scene where their faces are discernable for a few seconds.

Later still, Oulad-Syad and Fadel restage another of the comic highlights of "Ouarzazate Movie," a behind-the-scenes take of the Moroccan extras being equipped as Roman soldiers in preparation for a great charge scene.

"Cast members are responsible for their armor and weapons," warns a production assistant. "Armor and weapons must be returned at the end of the day. If you lose a piece of your armor, the cost will come out of your pay."

One (rare) instance in which Fadel's script adds value to Essafi's original comes during a break after the Roman charge. The extras have retreated to the shade, when they notice someone is being buried nearby. Since the town's sheikh, Faqih (Mestafa Tahtah), is among them, all of the Roman infantrymen join the funeral. Faqih begins the appropriate prayers over the grave but in the midst of things, the director calls the extras back to the set, so Faqih speeds up his recitation, wrapping the solemn spiritual moment in a few seconds.

Most importantly for "Pasolini," though, is Essafi's amusing conversation with a reserved gentleman who once worked as Pier Paolo Pasolini's personal assistant. "I did everything for him," he recalls, eyes twinkling from an expressionless face. "I carried his bags. We slept in the same room."

"But not the same bed," someone remarks. There is a pause and some muffled laughter. "It's just, well, he was that way, you know."

There's no question that "Ouarzazate Movie" is a great story, full of colorful characters. It cries out to be pillaged the way a quarry operator in search of a quick buck might hear a Roman temple complex demanding vivisection.

The documentary's central conceit - dirt-poor Moroccan villagers enthusiastically submitting to the seasonal piecework of the global film industry - is replete with comic incongruity. So are the film-literate remarks of Ouarzazatis.

During Essafi's chat with the ur-Thami, the old fellow discusses the Italian auteur's work with in the language of a film critic, notwithstanding his abaya and headgear. It's doubly ironic since, without a single movie theater, the only way Ouarzazatis can consume cinema is via television, VHS tape and DVD.

Oulad-Syad and Fadel mine the same comic vein. Early in "Pasolini," Thami and another seasoned extra walk through a desert set designed for the Italians. Thami places his hand on a column and remarks: "The ambience is quite different than [that] of 'Oedipus Rex.'"

"Waiting for Pasolini" follows a different story arc than "Ouarzazate Movie," though. In Essafi's documentary, the ironic convergences are trebled by the film's basic, often hand-held cinematography. There is something satisfyingly subversive about Essafi and his camera operator Isabelle Fermon wandering around behind the scenes of the sumptuous sets of multi-million-dollar projects, filming with a Beta video camera.

Such satisfaction is completely lacking in the work of Oulad-Syad's cinematographer Thierry Lebigre, whose ponderings of wind-blown plastic bags, ersatz-ancient monuments, and the creased face of Mohamed Majd emulate the look of the very Ouarzazate-shot studio films Essafi dissects.

Where Essafi lampoons the absurd inequities of the global film industry, Oulad-Syad and Fadel use this tangle of ironies as a skeleton upon which to graft hunks of Pasolini's life and work, transposed to the rural Moroccan context.

As it happens, a good deal of the material Fadel plunders from Essafi's film does resonate with the Italian intellectual's thought and work. His 1963 "La Ricotta," one of four shorts commissioned (from Pasolini, Rossellini, Godard and Gregoretti) for the feature film "RoGoPaG," centers on a destitute man working as an extra in a biblical epic.

Pasolini's work mingled the sacred and the profane, both of which are close to the lives of Ouarzazatis. Religion here is embodied in Sheikh Faqih. A well-oiled rogue, he collects a cut of every extra's paycheck - donations, he calls them, for the village mosque - and spends the money on new furniture for his house. On a less comic note, he helps his friend Mekki prepare for Hajj. Then, once Mekki's out of the way, the sheikh arranges a secret meeting with the man's wife Yamina, for whom he claims unrequited love. His libidinous designs are diverted, though, when a young female relative arrives in town, sent to find a job in the movie business.

For Fadel, the people's grinding poverty is the backdrop for Thami's conundrum about what to do once people realize they're waiting for a dead man. Channeling a made-for-TV variant of Vladimir's soliloquy (from Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"), a drunk Thami falls to his knees before his Pasolini poster. "Why did you die?" he asks. "Why didn't you wait for me?"

At once weaker than "Ouarzazate Movie" and more ambitious, "Waiting for Pasolini" offers a challenge to critics. Though neither Essafi nor his film receive thanks - at least prominent thanks - in Oulad-Syad's credits, it's unclear what the documentarian's relationship is to the feature (Essafi did not respond to interview requests for this story).

Pragmatically speaking, you might simply congratulate both directors for telling Ouarzazate's brilliant story twice. On the other hand, it would be a pity if "Waiting for Pasolini" became "that Ouarzazate movie" in the public consciousness at the expense of Essafi's original. Oulad-Syad's movie reminds you of how fine the line is between homage and knock-off.

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.