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BAB’AZIZ: THE PRINCE WHO CONTEMPLATED HIS SOUL
Directed by Nacer Khemir
Written by Khemir & Tonino Guerra
Director of Photography, Mahmoud Kalari
Edited by Isabelle Rathery
Music by Armand Amar
Released by Typecast Releasing
Language: Arabic & Farsi with English subtitles
Tunisia/France/Iran/Germany/Hungary/UK. 96 min. Not Rated
With Parviz Shahinkhou, Maryam Hamid, Kaveh Khodashenas, Nessim Kahloul, Mohamed Grayaa, Golshifteh Farahani & Hossein Panahi

Bab’Aziz is a reminder that the Muslim world once conjured images of Arabian fairytales more readily than it did war or the clash of civilizations. Borrowing from this culture’s rich tapestry of mysticism, fables, and song, Nacer Khemir directs a cinematic poem as a tribute to the forgotten face of Islam. But his fairytale isn’t just an exercise in nostalgia. The film shrewdly intertwines modernity into its timeless, magical narrative, making the reconciliation of Islam’s golden age with its turbulent political reality seem possible and essential.

Bab’Aziz (Parviz Shahinkhou), an old blind dervish, leads his feisty young granddaughter Ishtar (Maryam Hamid) to a mysterious gathering somewhere in the desert. Because he practices Sufism, a mystical Islamic sect emphasizing spirituality over ritual, faith is his only guide in the endless, abstract terrain. To quench Ishtar’s boredom along the way, Bab’Aziz tells her the story of a prince who became transfixed contemplating his soul in a pool of water. To quench the viewer’s boredom – if the exquisite cinematography isn’t transfixing enough – Khemir places other characters on the path to the gathering. There is Osman (Mohamed Grayaa), the sand carrier who searches for a woman he met in paradise at the bottom of a well; Zaid (Nessim Khaloul), the singer who searches for his love here on earth; and a crazed man looking to take revenge on a red-haired dervish. Though these plotlines are meant to stimulate a multi-faceted meditation on faith, the fact that they remain somewhat disjointed feels like a directorial misstep.

But the triumph of Bab’Aziz is not in its story lines, which, for the most part, seem like clichéd rehashings of Arabic folklore. It’s Khemir’s flawless adaptation of magic realism that transforms these tales into a lucid dream which plays out in the crossroads of fantasy and the real world – a place where djinns (demons) and men, horses and cars, Ali Baba robes and denim jackets all gracefully coexist.

Beyond its cultural ambitions, Bab’Aziz is above all a sensory joyride, flooding the viewer with breathtaking desert landscapes (shot mostly in Iran) and beautiful Arabic songs. And if meditative poetry is not your idea of a good time, the climactic dervish gathering filmed in the ancient city of Bam (destroyed by an earthquake just months later) is one spectacular party that could put the Burning Man festival to shame. Yana Litovsky
February 8, 2008