I wouldn't recommend this movie any more than I would advise anyone to consume some strange herb, knowing that many will not find any of the flavour, whilst others may end up having a very bad trip.
My alternative title for the film would indeed be Bad Trip. (V suggests The Wrong Trip).
Oliver Laxe's chosen title refers to an apparently Islamic concept — a bridge leading at once to paradise and perdition — yet this seems a bit crowbarred on to me.
It won the Jury prize at Cannes, yet Peter Bradshaw described it in the Guardian as a 'path to nowhere', ending frustratingly in a 'wildness of un-meaning.'
Yet the thing is that it does begin as a journey to somewhere, which only around the midpoint abruptly segues into this un-meaningful trip to nowhere, and some people are undoubtedly going to connect with that, even as they discover it to be existentially rather jarring.
Having invited us to invest our curiosity in various narrative hooks (a missing person, a fun fiesta somewhere over the next hill, and a rapidly declining North African and possibly wider geopolitical backdrop) we reach a point where any resolution has suddenly turned inconceivable.
And this is either going to seem like one big cosmic 'meh', or it will do something to you like it did to me, which is send me to sleep thinking about many things I have not thought about in a very long time.
It does seem like a masterful piece of film-making, expended on what also seems to be some very un-masterful storytelling.
How deliberate and useful this latter aspect of it is will be a highly subjective take-out I suspect. The characters are sketchy and no effort has been made to fill them out better via dialogue. They are mostly interesting as a collective.
Even before the film's sudden mid-life switch presents itself as a possible metaphor for the journey that we all make, Laxe has made it obvious that all of these individuals have already chosen to swerve away from the main road before we first see them coming together in the desert.
There's something orientalist about all this, at least in precisely the same way that the stories of Paul Bowles are orientalist and I don't mind it there at all, but I think I would mind it if a European director used the landscape around here in a similar way to make a perhaps trite point about first worlders adrift in a hostile, near-allegorical landscape.
It has actually been attempted and the only time I enjoyed it was Gareth Edwards's calling card, Monsters — which, like this, also had a fabulous score. And this particular region has been used before, tritely, in Babel.)
My alternative title for the film would indeed be Bad Trip. (V suggests The Wrong Trip).
Oliver Laxe's chosen title refers to an apparently Islamic concept — a bridge leading at once to paradise and perdition — yet this seems a bit crowbarred on to me.
It won the Jury prize at Cannes, yet Peter Bradshaw described it in the Guardian as a 'path to nowhere', ending frustratingly in a 'wildness of un-meaning.'
Yet the thing is that it does begin as a journey to somewhere, which only around the midpoint abruptly segues into this un-meaningful trip to nowhere, and some people are undoubtedly going to connect with that, even as they discover it to be existentially rather jarring.
Having invited us to invest our curiosity in various narrative hooks (a missing person, a fun fiesta somewhere over the next hill, and a rapidly declining North African and possibly wider geopolitical backdrop) we reach a point where any resolution has suddenly turned inconceivable.
And this is either going to seem like one big cosmic 'meh', or it will do something to you like it did to me, which is send me to sleep thinking about many things I have not thought about in a very long time.
It does seem like a masterful piece of film-making, expended on what also seems to be some very un-masterful storytelling.
How deliberate and useful this latter aspect of it is will be a highly subjective take-out I suspect. The characters are sketchy and no effort has been made to fill them out better via dialogue. They are mostly interesting as a collective.
Even before the film's sudden mid-life switch presents itself as a possible metaphor for the journey that we all make, Laxe has made it obvious that all of these individuals have already chosen to swerve away from the main road before we first see them coming together in the desert.
There's something orientalist about all this, at least in precisely the same way that the stories of Paul Bowles are orientalist and I don't mind it there at all, but I think I would mind it if a European director used the landscape around here in a similar way to make a perhaps trite point about first worlders adrift in a hostile, near-allegorical landscape.
It has actually been attempted and the only time I enjoyed it was Gareth Edwards's calling card, Monsters — which, like this, also had a fabulous score. And this particular region has been used before, tritely, in Babel.)
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